as with the loadstone; their powers have been discovered by our predecessors, but we have put them to their noblest uses.

"The venerable names of Bacon and Locke were, if 1 mistake not, mentioned in the same class with Newton, and though the learned gentleman could no doubt have made his selection more numerous, I doubt if he could have made it stronger, or more to the purpose of his own assertions.

"I have always regarded Bacon as the father of philosophy in this country; yet it is no breach of candour to observe, that the darkness of the age which he enlightened affords a favourable contrast to set off the splendour of his talents: but do we, who applaud him, read him? Yet if such is our veneration for times long since gone by, why do we not? The fact is, intermediate writers have disseminated his original matter through more pleasing vehicles, and we concur, whether commendably or not, to put his volumes upon the superannuated list, allowing him however an unalienable compensation upon our praise, and reserving to ourselves a right of taking him from the shelf, whenever we are disposed to sink the merit of a more recent author by a comparison with him. I will not therefore disturb his venerable dust, but turn without further delay to the author of the Essay upon the Human Understanding.

NUMBER LXXXIII.

Ingeniis non ille favet, plauditque sepultis,
Nostra sed impugnat, nos nostraque lividus odit.

HORAT.

Not to the illustrious dead his homage pays,
But envious robs the living of their praise. FRANCIS.

THE sarcastic speech of the old snarler, with which we concluded the last paper, being undeserved on the part of the person to whom it was applied, was very properly disregarded; and the clergyman proceeded as follows:

"The poets you have named will never be mentioned by me but with a degree of enthu siasm, which I should rather expect to be accused of carrying to excess than of erring in the opposite extreme, had you not put me on my guard against partiality, by charging me with it beforehand. I shall therefore without further apology or preface begin with Shakspeare, first named by you, and first in fame as well as time: it would be madness in me to think of bringing any poet now living into competition with Shakspeare; but I hope it will not be thought madness, or any thing resembling to it, to observe to you, that it is not in the nature of things possible for any poet to appear in an age so polished as this of ours, who can be brought into any critical comparison with that extraor dinary and eccentric genius.

"This essay, which professes to define every thing, as it arises or passes in the mind, must ultimately be compiled from observations of its author upon himself and within himself: before "For let us consider the two great striking I compare the merit of this work therefore with features of his drama, sublimity and character. the merit of any other man's work of our own Now sublimity involves sentiment and expresimmediate times, I must compare what it ad- sion; the first of these is in the soul of the poet; vances, as general to mankind, with what I per- it is that portion of inspiration which we perceive within my particular self: and upon this re-sonify when we call it The Muse: so far I am ference, speaking only for an humble individual, free to acknowledge there is no immediate reason I must own to my shame, that my understand-to be given, why her visits should be confined ing and the author's do by no means coincide to any age, nation, or person; she may fire the either in definitions or ideas. I may have reason heart of the poet on the shores of Honia three to lament the inaccuracy or the sluggishness of thousand years ago, or on the banks of the Cam my own senses and perceptions, but I cannot or Isis at the present moment; but so far as submit to any man's doctrine against their con- language is concerned, I may venture to say, viction: I will only say that Mr. Locke's meta- that modern diction will never strike modern physics are not my metaphysics, and, as it would ears with that awful kind of magic which antibe an ill compliment to any one of our contem-quity gives to words and phrases no longer in faporaries to compare him with a writer who to me is unintelligible, so will I hope it can never be considered as a reflection upon so great a name as Mr. Locke's not to be understood by so insignificant a man as myself."

"Well Sir," cried the sullen gentleman, with a sneer, "I think you have contrived to despatch our philosophers; you have now only a few obscure poets to dismiss in like manner, and you will have a clear field for yourself and your friends."

miliar use: in this respect our great dramatic poet hath an advantage over his distant descendants, which he owes to time, and which of course is one more than he is indebted for to his own preeminent genius. As for character, which I suggested as one of the two most striking features of Shakspeare's drama (or in other words the true and perfect delineation of nature,) in this our poet is indeed a master unrivaled; yet who will not allow the happy coincidence of time for this perfection in a writer of the drama? The different orders of men, which Shakspeare saw and copied are in many instances extinct,

taste of those times, in which Titus Andronicus first appeared, than the favour which that horrid spectacle was received with? Yet of this we are assured by Ben Jonson. If this play was Shakspeare's, it was his first production, and some of his best commentators are of opinion it was actually written by him whilst he resided at Stratford-upon-Avon. Had this

and such must have the charms of novelty at least in our eyes: and has the modern dramatist the same rich and various field of character? The level manners of a polished age furnish little choice to an author, who now enters on the task, in which such numbers have gone before him, and so exhausted the materials that it is justly to be wondered at, when any thing like variety can be struck out. Dramatic charac-production been followed by the three parts of ters are portraits drawn from nature, and if all the sitters have a family likeness, the artist must either depart from the truth, or preserve the resemblance; in like manner the poet must either invent characters, of which there is no counterpart in existence, or expose himself to the danger of an insipid and tiresome repetition: to add to his difficulties it so happens, that the present age, whilst it furnishes less variety to his choice, requires more than ever for its own amusement; the dignity of the stage must of course be prostituted to the unnatural resources of a wild imagination, and its propriety disturbed; music will supply those resources for a time, and accordingly we find the French and English theatres in the dearth of character feeding upon the airy diet of sound; but this, with all the support that spectacle can give, is but a flimsy substitute, whilst the public, whose taste in the mean time becomes vitiated

-media inter carmina poscunt Aut ursum aut pugiles

the latter of which monstrous prostitutions we have lately seen our national stage most shamefully exposed to.

"By comparing the different ages of poetry in our own country with those of Greece, we shall find the effects agree in each: for as the refinement of manners took place, the language of poetry became also more refined, and with greater correctness had less energy and force: the style of the poet, like the characters of the people, takes a brighter polish, which, whilst it smooths away its former asperities and protuberances, weakens the staple of its fabric, and what it gives to the elegance and delicacy of its complexion, takes away from the strength and sturdiness of its constitution. Whoever will compare schylus with Euripides, and Aristophanes with Menander, will need no other illustration of this remark.

"Consider only the inequalities of Shakspeare's dramas: examine not only one with another, but compare even scene with scene in the same play. Did ever the imagination of man run riot into such wild and opposite extremes? Could this be done, or being done, would it be suffered in the present age? How many of these plays, if acted as they were originally written, would now be permitted to pass? Can we have a stronger proof of the barbarous

Henry the Sixth, by Love's Labour's Lost, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors, or some few others, which our stage does not attempt to reform, that critic must have had a very singular degree of intuition, who had discovered in these dramas a genius capable of producing the Macbeth. How would a young author be received in the present time, who was to make his first essay before the public with such a piece as Titus Andronicus? Now if we are warranted in saying there are several of Shakspeare's dramas, which could not live upon our present stage at any rate, and few, if any, that would pass without just censure in many parts, were they represented in their original state, we must acknowledge it is with reason that our living authors, standing in awe of their audiences, dare not aim at those bold and irregular flights of imagination, which carried our bard to such a height of fame; and therefore it was that I ventured awhile ago to say, there can be no poet in a polished and critical age like this, who can be brought into any fair comparison with so bold and eccentric a genius as Shakspeare, of whom we may say with Horace

Tentavit quoque rem, si digne vertere posset ; Et placuit sibi, natura sublimis et acer; Nam spirat tragicum satis, et feliciter audet ; Sed turpem putal in scriptis metuitque lituram. When I bring to my recollection the several periods of our English drama since the age of Shakspeare, I could name many dates, when it has been in hands far inferior to the present, and were it my purpose to enter into particulars, I should not scruple to appeal to several dramatic productions within the compass of our own times, but as the task of separating and selecting one from another amongst our own contemporaries can never be a pleasant task, nor one I would willingly engage in, I will content myself with referring to our stock of modern acting plays; many of which, having passed the ordeal of critics (who speak the same language with what I have just now heard, and are continually crying down those they live with), may perhaps take their turn with posterity, and be hereafter as partially overrated upon a comparison with the productions of the age to come, as they are now undervalued when compared with those of the ages past.

"With regard to Milton, if we could not

Bb

On a rock, whose haughty brow

Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of wo,

With haggard eyes the poet stood;
(Loose his beard and hoary hair
Stream'd like a meteor to the troubled air)
And with a master's hand and prophet's fire
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.

name any one epic poet of our nation since his | den in our late Churchill, and the sweetness of time, it would be saying no more of us than Pope in our lamented Goldsmith: enraptured may be said of the world in general, from the as I am with the lyre of Timotheus in the Feast era of Homer to that of Virgil. Greece had of Alexander, I contemplate with awful delight one standard epic poet; Rome had no more: Gray's enthusiastic bardEngland has her Milton. If Dryden pronounced that "the force of nature could no further go,' he was at once a good authority and a strong example of the truth of the assertion: if his genius shrunk from the undertaking, can we wonder that so few have taken it up? Yet we will not forget Leonidas; nor speak slightly of its merit; and as death has removed the worthy author where he cannot hear our praises, the world may now, as in the case of Milton heretofore, be so much the more forward to bestow them. If the Samson Agonistes is nearer to the simplicity of its Grecian original than either our own Elfrida or Caractacus, those dramas have a tender interest, a pathetic delicacy, which in that are wanting; and though Comus has every charm of language, it has a vein of allegory that impoverishes the mine.

"The variety of Dryden's genius was such as to preclude comparison, were I disposed to attempt it. Of his dramatic productions he himself declares," that he never wrote any thing in that way to please himself but his All for Love." For ever under arms, he lived in a continual state of poetic warfare with his contemporaries, galling and galled by turns: he subsisted also by expedients, and necessity, which forced his genius into quicker growth than was natural to it, made a rich harvest but slovenly husbandry; it drove him also into a duplicity of character that is painful to reflect upon; it put him ill at ease within himself, and verified the fable of the nightingale singing with a thorn at its breast.

“Pope's versification gave the last and finishing polish to our English poetry; his lyre more sweet than Dryden's, was less sonorous; his touch more correct, but not so bold: his strain more musical in its tones, but not so striking in its effect: review him as a critic, and review him throughout, you will pronounce him the most perfect poet in our language; read him as an enthusiast and examine him in detail, you cannot refuse him your approbation, but your rapture you will reserve for Dryden.

Let the living muses speak for themselves: 1 have all the warmth of a friend, but not the presumption of a champion: the poets you now so loudly praise when dead, found the world as loud in defamation when living: you are now paying the debts of your predecessors, and atoning for their injustice; posterity will in like manner atone for yours.

"You mentioned the name of Addison in your list, not altogether as a poet, I presume, but rather as the man of morals, the reformer of manners, and the friend of religion; with affection I subscribe my tribute to his literary fame, to his amiable character: in sweetness and simplicity of style, in purity and perspicuity of sentiment, he is a model to all essayists. At the same time I feel the honest pride of a contemporary in recalling to your memory the name of Samuel Johnson, who as a moral and religious essayist, as an acute and penetrating critic, as a nervous and elaborate poet, an excellent grammarian, and a general scholar, ranks with the first names in literature.

"Not having named an historian in your list of illustrious men, you have precluded me from adverting to the histories of Hume, Robertson, Lyttleton, Henry, Gibbon, and others, who are a host of writers, which all antiquity cannot equal."

Here the clergyman concluded: the conversation now grew desultory and uninteresting, and I returned home.

NUMBER LXXXIV.

Est genus hominum, qui esse primos se omnium rerum volunt,
Nec sunt.

TERENT. EUN.

"But you will tell me this does not apply to the question in dispute, and that instead of settling precedency between your poets, it is time for me to produce my own: for this I shall beg your excuse; my zeal for my contemporaries shall not hurry them into comparisons, which their own modesty would revolt from; it hath prompted me to intrude upon your patience, whilst I submitted a few mitigating considerations in their behalf; not as an answer to your WHAT a delightful thing it is to find one's self in challenge, but as an effort to soften your con- a company, where tempers harmonize, and tempt. I confess to you I have sometimes flat-hearts are open; where wit flows without any tered myself I have found the strength of Dry- | checks but what decency and good nature im

There is a class of men, who wish to excel others in every thing, yet do not.

pose, and humour indulges itself in those harm-ty of party is so far in the wane that it serves less freaks and caprices, that raise a laugh by rather to whet our wits than our swords against which no man's feelings are offended. each other: the agitation of political opinions is no longer a subject fatal to the peace of the table, but takes its turn with other topics, without any breach of good manners or good fellowship. It were too much to say that there are no general causes still subsisting, which annoy our social comforts, and disgrace our tempers; they are still too many, and it is amongst the duties of an Observer to set a mark upon them, though by so doing I may run into repetition, for I am not conscious of having any thing to say upon the subject which I have not said before; but if a beggar who asks charity, because of his importunity, shall at length be relieved; an author, perhaps, who enforces his advice, shall in the end be listened to.

This can only happen to us in a land of freedom; it is in vain to hope for it in those arbitrary countries, where men must lock the doors against spies and informers, and must intrust their lives, whilst they impart their sentiments to each other. In such circumstances, a mind enlightened by education is no longer a blessing: what is the advantage of discernment, and how is a man profited by his capacity of separating truth from error, if he dare not exercise that faculty? It were safer to be the blind aupe of superstition than the intuitive philosopher, if born within the jurisdiction of an inquisitorial tribunal. Can a man felicitate himself in the glow of genius and the gayety of wit, when breathing the air of a country, where so dire an instrument is in force as a lettre de cachet? But experience hath shown us, that if arbitrary monarchs cannot keep their people in ignorance, they cannot retain the mind in slavery; if men read, they will meditate: if they travel, they will compare; and their minds must be as dark as the dungeons which imprison their persons, if they do not rise with indignation against such monstrous maxims, as imprisonment at pleasure for undefined offences, self-accusations extorted by torments and secret trials, where the prisoner hath neither voice nor advocate. Let those princes, whose government is so administered, "make darkness their pavilion," and draw their very mountains down upon them to shut out the light, or expect the period of their despotism: illuminated minds will not be kept in slavery.

I must, therefore, again and again insist upon it, that there are two sides to every argument, and that it is the natural and unalienable right of man to be heard in support of his opinion, he having first lent a patient ear to the speaker who maintains sentiments which oppose that opinion: I do humbly apprehend that an overbearing voice, and noisy volubility of tongue, are proofs of a very underbred fellow, and it is with regret I see society too frequently disturbed in its most delectable enjoyments by this odious character: I do not see that any man hath a right, by obligation or otherwise, to lay me under a necessity of thinking exactly as he thinks. Though I admit, that "from the fulness of the heart the tongue speaketh," I do not admit any superior pretensions it hath to be Sir Oracle from the fulness of the pocket. In the name of freedom, what claim hath any man to be the tyrant of the table? As well he may avail himself of the greater force of his fists as of his lungs. Doth sense consist in sound, or is truth only to be measured by the noise it makes? Can it be a disgrace to be convinced, or doth any one lose by the exchange, who resigns his own opinion for a better? When I reflect upon the advantages of our public schools, where puerile tempers are corrected by collision; upon the mathematical studies and scholastic exercises of our universities, I am no less grieved than astonished to discover so few proficients in well-mannered controversy, so very few who seem to make truth the object of their investigation, or will spare a few patient moments, from the eternal repetition of their own deafening jargon, to the temperate reply of men, probably better qualified to speak than themselves.

With a nation so free, so highly enlightened, and so eminent in letters as the English, we may well expect to find the social qualities in their best state; and it is but justice to the age we live in, to confess those expectations may be fully gratified. There are some, perhaps, who will not subscribe to this assertion, but probably those very people make the disappointments they tomplain of: if a man takes no pains to please his company, he is little likely to be pleased by his company. Liberty, though essential to good society, may in some of its effects operate against it; for as it makes men independent, independence will occasionally be found to make them arrogant, and none such can be good companions; yet, let me say for the contemporaries I am living with, that within the period of my own acquaintance with the world, the reform in its social manners and habits has been gradual and increasing. The feudal haughtiness There is another grievance not unfrequent, of our nobility has totally disappeared, and, in though inferior to this above mentioned, which place of a proud distant reserve, a pleasing sua-proceeds jointly from the mixed nature of society, vity and companionable ease have almost uni- and the ebullitions of freedom in this happy versally obtained among the higher orders: the country; I mean that roar of mirth, and unpedantry of office is gone, and even the animosi-controled flow of spirits, which hath more val

He was endured for a considerable time with

manners and experience in the world. This encouragement only rendered him more insupportable; when at last an elderly gentleman seized the opportunity of a short pause in his discourse, to address the following reproof to this eternal talker.

garity in it than ease, more noise than gayety: | could no where meet a happier opportunity for the stream of elegant festivity will never over- discussion. flow its banks; the delicacy of sex, the dignity of rank, and the decorum of certain profes-that patience which is natural to men of good sions, should never be overlooked, as to alarm the feelings of any person present, interested for their preservation. When the softer sex entrust themselves to our society, we should never forget the tender respect due to them even in our gayest hours. When the higher orders by descending, and the lower by ascending out of their sphere, meet upon the level of good fellowship, let not our superiors be revolted by a rusticity, however jovial, nor driven back into their fastnesses, by overstepping the partition line, and making saucy inroads into their proper quarters. Who questions a minister about news or politics? Who talks ribaldry before a bishop? once in seven years is often enough for the levelling familiarity of electioneering manners.

"We have listened to you, Sir, a long time with attention, and it does not appear that any body present is disposed to question either your independence or the comforts that are annexed to it; we rejoice that you possess them in so full a degree, and we wish every landed gentleman in the kingdom was in the same happy predicament with yourself; but we are traders, Sir, and are beholden to our industry and fair dealing for what you inherit from your ancestors, and yourself never toiled for. Might it not be

adventures in foreign climes and countries; of our dangers, difficulties, and escapes; our remarks upon the manners and customs of other nations, as to enclose the whole conversation within the hedge of your own estate, and shut up intelligence, wide as the world itself, within the narrow limits of your parish pound? Believe me, Sir, we are glad to hear you, and we respect your order in the state, but we are willing to hear each other also in our turns; for let me observe to you in the style of the counting house, that conversation, like trade, abhors a monopoly, and that a man can derive no benefit from society, unless he hears others talk as well as himself."

There is another remark which I cannot ex-altogether as amusing to you to be told of our cuse myself from making, if it were only for the sake of those luckless beings, who being born with duller faculties, or stamped by the hand of nature with oddities either of humour or of person, seem to be set up in society as butts for the arrows of raillery and ridicule. If the object thus made the victim of the company, feels the shaft, who but must suffer with him? If he feels it not, we blush for human nature, whose dignity is sacrificed in his person; and as for the professed buffoon, I I take him to have as little pretensions to true humour as a punster has to true wit. There is scope enough for all the eccentricities of character without turning cruelty into sport; let satire take its share, but let vice only shrink before it; let it silence the tongue that wantonly violates truth or defames reputation; let it batter the insulting, towers of pride, but let the air-built castles of vanity, much more the humble roof of the indigent and infirm, never provoke its spleen.

It happened to me not long ago to fall into company with some very respectable persons, chiefly of the mercantile order, where a country gentleman, who was a stranger to most of the party, took upon him to entertain the company with a tedious string of stories, of no sort of importance to any soul present, and all tending to display his own consequence, fortune, and independence. Such conversation was ill calculated for the company present, the majority of whom had I dare say been the founders of their own fortunes, and I should doubt if there was any quarter of the globe accessible to commerce, which had not been resorted to by some one or other then sitting at the table. This uninteresting egotist, therefore, was the more unpardonable, as he shut out every topic of curious and amusing information, which

NUMBER LXXXV.

I was in company the other day with a young gentleman who had newly succeeded to a considerable estate, and was a good deal struck with the conversation of an elderly person present, who was very deliberately casting up the several demands that the community at large had upon his property.- "Are you aware, says he, "how small a portion of your revenue will properly remain to yourself, when you have satisfied all the claims which you must pay to society and your country, for living amongst us, and supporting the character of what is called a landed gentleman? Part of your income will be stopped for the maintenance of them who have none, under the denomination of poor rates; this may be called a fine upon the partiality of fortune, levied by the law of so