tain idea of our plan. The extremely familiar knowledge also which readers have of them might have been another objection, even in a work consisting chiefly of favourite passages;-things, which imply a certain amount of familiar knowledge, if not in the public at large, yet among readers in general. If any persons should object that some of these also are too familiar, the answer is, that they are of a nature which rendered it impossible for us, consistently with our plan, to omit them, and that readers in general would have missed them. We allude, in particular, to the Elegy in a Country Church-Yard and the Ode on the Prospect of Eton College. It is the privilege of fine writers, when happy in their treatment of a universal subject of thought or feeling, to leave such an impression of it in the reading world as almost to identify it with everybody's own reflections, or constitute it a sort of involuntary mental quotation. Of this kind are Gray's reflections in the church-yard, and his memories of school-boy happiness. Few people who know these passages by heart, ever think of a church-yard or a school-ground without calling them to mind.

The nature and the amount of the reader's familiarity with many other extracts are the reasons why we have extracted them. They constitute part of the object and essence of the book; for the familiarity is not a vulgar and repulsive one, but that of a noble and ever-fresh companion, whose society we can the less dispense with, the more we are accustomed to it. The book in this respect resembles

a set of pictures which it delights us to live with, or a collection of favourite songs and pieces of music, which we bind up in volumes in order that we may always have them at hand, or know where to find them. Who, in such a room full of pictures, would object to his Raphael or Titian? Or in such a collection of music, to his Beethoven, Rossini, or Paisiello? Our book may have little novelty in the least sense of the word; but it has the best in the greatest sense; that is to say, never-dying novelty ;—antiquity hung with ivy-blossoms and rose-buds; old friends with the evernew faces of wit, thought, and affection. Time has proved the genius with which it is filled. Age cannot wither it," nor "custom stale its variety." We ourselves have read, and shall continue to read it to our dying day; and we should not say thus much, especially on such an occasion, if we did not know that hundreds and thousands would do the same, whether they read it in this collection or not.

66

Letter to a New-born Child.

BY CATHERINE TALBOT.

THIS lady, whose posthumous "Essays" and "Reflections" were admired in their day, was niece of Thomson's friend, Lord Chancellor Talbot; and the "very young correspondent" to whom her pleasant letter is addressed, was daughter of the Chancellor's third son, John, afterwards a Welsh judge, ancestor of the present Earl Talbot. What became of the little lady is not mentioned. Miss Talbot had very delicate health, which she bore with great sweetness of temper. She led a maiden life, and died in the year 1770, aged forty-nine.

YOU

OU are heartily welcome, my dear little cousin, into this unquiet world; long may you continue in it, in all the happiness it can give, and bestow enough on all your friends to answer fully the impatience with which you have been expected. May you grow up to have every accomplishment that your good friend, the Bishop of Derry,* can already imagine in you; and in the meantime, may you have a nurse with a tuneable voice, that may not talk an immoderate deal of nonsense to you. You are at present, my dear, in a very philosophical disposition; the gaieties and follies of life have no attraction for you; its sorrows you kindly commiserate! but, however, do not suffer them to

* Thomas Rundle, another friend of Thomson's and the Chancellor's. See the note ensuing.

disturb your slumbers, and find charms in nothing but harmony and repose. You have as yet contracted no partialities, are entirely ignorant of party distinctions, and look with a perfect indifference on all human splendour. You have an absolute dislike to the vanities of dress; and are likely, for many months, to observe the Bishop of Bristol's first rule of conversation, Silence, though tempted to transgress it by the novelty and strangeness of all objects round you.* As you advance further in life, this philosophical temper will by degrees wear off; the first object of your admiration will probably be the candle, and thence (as we all of us do) you will contract a taste for the gaudy and the glaring, without making one moral reflection upon the danger of such false admiration as leads people many a time to burn their fingers. You will then begin to show great partiality for some very good aunts, who will contribute all they can towards spoiling you; but you will be equally fond of an excellent mamma, who will teach you, by her example, all sorts of good qualities; only let me warn you of one thing, my dear, and that is, not to learn of her to have such an immoderate love of home as is quite contrary to all the privileges of this polite age, and to give up so entirely all those pretty graces of whim, flutter, and affection, which so many charitable poets have declared to be the prerogative of our sex. my poor cousin, to what purpose will boast this prerogative, when your nurse tells you (with a pious care to sow

you

Oh !

*The Bishop of Bristol, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was Secker. His "first rule of conversation" is very good. It was on these two prelates that Pope wrote his couplet

By "decent" becoming.

E'en in a bishop I can spy desert;

Secker is decent, Rundle has a heart.

we are to understand the word in its classical sense of