gaiety of the vernal year. The evening sun was flaming over the distant western hills; not a breath stirred the crimson opening flow. ers, or the verdant spreading leaf. It was a golden moment to the poetic heart. I listened to the feathered warblers, pouring their harmony on every hand, with a congenial kindred regard, and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb their little song, or frighten them to another station. Even the hoary hawthorn twig that shot across the way, what heart at such a time but must have been interested in its welfare, and wished it preserved from the rudely browsing cattle, or the withering eastern blast. Such was the scene, and such was the hour, when, in a corner of my prospect, I spied one of the fairest pieces of nature's workmanship that ever crowned a poetic landscape, or met a poet's eye, those visionary bards excepted, who hold commerce with aerial beings." The reader must not content himself with barely admiring the elegance of this description, but he will observe how faithfully the peculiar features of the poet's mind are pourtrayed. No biographer could have drawn a more lively picture of that poetic enthusiasm for the beauties of nature, and the benevolent heart which Burns possessed, than he himself has here manifested. Perhaps there never was a period when the attention of legislators, of moralists, and divines ought to be more forcibly exerted than at present. The revolution of states and kingdoms has unhappily introduced a change of sentiments and manners, by no means favourable to virtue and the decencies of life. But, although our own country has not wholly escaped the infection of French principles and French manners, we cannot but, at the same time, deem it matter of sincere congratulation, that an honourable phalanx of British worthies appear no bly determined, in their respective stations, to stem the torrent of vice and infidelity. In the senate, on the bench of justice, from the pulpit, and the press, various efforts have been used, and, we trust, with no small success, to provide an antidote against that immorality and scepticism spawned from a neighbouring country. Amongst the productions of this useful tendency, a high rank is assigned to Mr. Sibbit's Dissertation on the Influence of Luxury, &c., by the editors of the Anti-Jacobin Review, the most indefatigable and zealous champions in this natural warfare between the good and the bad. They characterize it as a work in which a regard for religion, and the principles and manners of the rising generation, are happily blended with a flowing style, and an intimate acquaintance with the works of the learned. Whilst this writer, say they, has dedicated his speculations and enquiries to investigate the genius and spirit of nations, both ancient and modern, and to survey mankind with a philosophic eye, amidst the various changes that have occurred, the minds of attentive readers cannot fail to be enriched with a considerable fund of religious, as well as of moral and political information. In tracing the history of nations, in former as well as later times, Mr. Sibbit has clearly pointed out luxury as the bane, the efficient cause, the forerunner of their destruction. The example of Rome is particularly dwelt upon as a warning to Britain. While drawing the parallel in this essay, one of Britain's sons lifts up his faithful warning voice to caution against the baleful influence on morality, arising from eastern conquests, a long train of prosperity, and an introduction of the refinements of foreign nations. Nor does he omit his zealous endeayours against the fashionable precepts of a new philosophy, the tendency of which is to subvert every principle of morality and religion, upon which the pillars of society are founded. When describing those vain and conceited sophists who arose in Greece, whose philosophy was imported into Rome, and who disseminated principles which were pernicious, in a high degree, to the welfare and peace of mankind, Mr. Sibbit, in a nervous style, makes the following very seasonable reflections: "The writings of those philosophers, if they deserve so respectable a name, were the offspring of vanity and presumption; they were actuated by motives very similar to those which influence the moderns of the same school. The fever of ambition, the desire of distinction, which sometimes inspires the literary hero, is often as fatal to the repose of mankind as the military ardour which impels the conqueror to carry devastation and terror over the world, in search of laurels and of triumphs. Every consideration is sacrificed to vanity and fame; and the praise of men, by people of this stamp, is preferred to the ap-. probation of Heaven. The most effectual method, therefore, to gratify this restless passion, and to obtain the admiration of the crowd, is to attack every thing which the world had hitherto deemed sacred and venerable in religion and in morals. To endeavour to confound in the distinctions of right and wrong, to mislead and to corrupt the giddy populace by the boldness and the novelty of their assertions, is a sure way to be conspicuous for a time, and to live in the mouths of men; and paradoxes, absurdities, cynic arrogance, and obscenity, will too often, in a vicious age, gain more applause than the sublime productions of genius and virtue. The epigram of a buffoon, the whining elegy, and the flimsy novel, will be read with avidity in frivolous times, while Homer and Milton, and Demosthenes and Burke, will be neglected for luxury and vice have a tendency to corrupt and debilitate the mind as well as the body; to contaminate our intellectual task as well as our moral perceptions; and, when we want energy and purity of soul to comprehend the vast and grand, or to be charmed with the delicate and elegant compositions of true genius, we, from the mere depravity of our faculties, delight to feed upon the disgusting garbage, or the impertinent conceits, of the literary profligates of the day, the immoral and puny writers of a degenerate age; and there is nothing, perhaps, so fatal to the morals of a nation as corrupt and vicious literary productions, as they diffuse their influence over a large space, and effect all ranks and descriptions of men." CENTO. For the Literary Magazine. CHARACTER AND SENTIMENTS From his own letters. COWPER, of whose real character and sentiments so much curiosity may be reasonably entertained, has described himself with no small degree of accuracy in his letters. As to his biographer, Hayley, he can hardly be allowed to have thrown the smallest light upon the character of this poet. His memoirs are deficient exactly on the points on which the correspondence itself is silent, and he seldom relates any thing of which the letters themselves do not give us more adequate notions than his narrative. In passing through the last volume of his letters, the eye and attention are naturally arrested by those passages in which the author's individual character is pourtrayed, either indirectly or directly. The following seem to be thus descriptive and characteristic. Last week I made a trip to Gayhurst, the seat of Mr. Wright, about four miles off. He understood that I did not much affect strange faces, and sent over his servant on 1 purpose to inform me, that he was going into Leicestershire, and that, if I chose to see the gardens, I might gratify myself without danger of seeing the proprietor. I accepted the invitation, and was delighted with all I found there. My scribbling humour has (1780) of late been entirely absorbed in the passion for landscape drawing. So long as I am pleased with an employment, I am capable of unwearied application, because my feelings are all of the intense kind; I never received a little pleasure from any thing in my life; if I am delighted, it is in the extreme. The unhappy consequences of this temperature is, that my attachment to any occupation seldom out-lives the novelty of it. That nerve of my imagination that feels the touch of any particular amusement, twangs under the energy of the pressure with so much vehemence, that it soon becomes sensible of weariness and fatigue. but Truncus ficulnus, inutile lignum; consequently, though I should be planed 'till I am as thin as a wafer, it would be but rubbish to the last. It is not when I will, nor upon what I will, but as a thought happens to occur to me; and then I versify, whether I will or not. My morning is engrossed by the garden; and in the afternoon, 'till I have drunk tea, I am fit for nothing. I am not insensible of the value of a good name, either as a man or an author. But my life, having been in many respects a series of mortifications and disappointments, I am become less apprehensive, and impressible perhaps in some points, than I should have otherwise been. I am pretty much in the garden at this season of the year, so read but little. In summer time I am as giddy-headed as a boy, and can settle to nothing. Winter condenses me, and makes me lumpish and sober; and then I can read all day long. I can compare this mind of mine to nothing that resembles it more, that to a board that is under the carpenter's plane (I mean while I am writing to you): the shavings are my uppermost thoughts; after a few strokes of the tool, it requires a new surface; this again upon a repetition of his task he takes off, and a new surface still succeeds: whether the shavings of the present day will be worth your acceptance, I know not. I am unfortunately made neither of cedar, nor of mahogany, Sleep, that refreshes my body, seems to cripple me in every other respect. As the evening approaches, I grow more alert, and when I am retiring to bed, am more fit for mental occupation than at any other time. So it fares with us, whom they call nervous, By a strange inversion of the animal economy, we are ready to sleep when we have most need to be awake, and go to bed just when we might sit up to some purpose. The watch is irregularly wound up, it goes in the night when it is not wanted, and in the day stands still. In many respects we have the advantage of our forefathers, the Picts. We sleep in a whole skin, and are not obliged to submit to the painful operation of puncturating ourselves from head to foot, in order that we may be decently dressed and fit to appear abroad. But, on the other hand, we have reason enough to envy them their tone of nerves, and that flow of spirits, which effectually secured them from all uncomfortable impressions of a gloomy atmosphere, and from every shade of melancholy from every other cause. They understood (I suppose) the use of vulnerary herbs, having frequent occasion for some skill in surgery, but physicians (I presume) they had none, having no need of any. Is it possible, that a creature like myself can be descended from such progenitors, in whom there appears not a single trace of family resemblance? What an alteration have a few ages made! They, without clothing, would defy the severest seasons, and I, with all the accommodations that art has since invented, am hardly secure even in the mildest. If the wind blows upon me when my pores are open, I catch cold. A cough is the consequence. I suppose if such a disorder could have seized a Pict, his friends would have concluded that a bone had stuck in his throat, and that he was in some danger of choking. They would perhaps have addressed themselves to the cure of his cough by thrusting their fingers into his gullet, which would only have exaspe rated the case. But they would never have thought of administering laudanum, my only remedy. For this difference however, that has obtained between me and my ancestors, I am indebted to the luxurious practices and enfeebling self-indulgence of a long line of grandsires, who from generation to generation have been employed in deteriorating the breed, till at last the collected effects of all their follies have centered in my puny self. A man indeed, but not in the image of those that went before me. A man, who sigh and groan, who wear out life in dejection and oppression of spirits, and who never think of the aborigines of the country to which I belong, without wishing that I had been born among them. When I write to a stranger, I feel myself deprived of half my intellects. I suspect that I shall write nonsense, and I do so. I tremble at the thought of an inaccuracy, and become absolutely ungrammatical. I feel myself sweat. I have recourse to the knife and the pounce. I correct half a dozen blunders, which in a common case I should not have committed, and have no sooner dispatched what I have written, than I recollect how much better I could have made it; how easily and gen teelly I could have relaxed the stiffness of the phrase, and have cured the insufferable awkwardness of the whole, had they struck me a little earlier. Thus we stand in awe of we know not what, and miscarry through mere desire to excel. A neighbour of mine, in Silverend, keeps an ass; the ass lives on the other side of the garden-wall, and I am writting in the greenhouse: it happens that he is this morning most musically disposed, whether cheered by the fine wea ther, or by some new tune which he has just acquired, or by finding his voice more harmonious than usual. It would be cruel to mortify so fine a singer, therefore I do not tell him that he interrupts and hinders me, but I venture to tell you so, and to plead his performance in excuse of my abrupt conclusion. I send you the goldfinches, with which you will do as you see good. I sit with all the windows and the door wide open, and am regal. ed with the scent of every flower in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive, I should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets, All the sounds that nature utters are delightful, at least in this country. I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa, or the growlings of bears in Russia very pleasing, but I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical, save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me, without one exception. I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour, for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farmyard, is no bad performer: and as to insects, if the black beetle, and beetles indeed of all hues, will keep out of my way, I have no objection to any of the rest; on the contrary, in whatever key they sing, from the gnat's fine treble to the bass of the humble bee, I admire them all. Seriously, however, it strikes me as a very observable instance of providential kindness to man, that such an exact accord has been contrived between his ear and the sounds with which, at least in a rural situation, it is almost every moment visited. All the world is sensible of the uncomfortable effect that certain sounds have upon the nerves, and consequently upon the spirits. And if a sinful world had been filled with such as would have curdled the blood, and have made the sense of hearing a perpetual inconvenience, I do not know that we should have had a right to complain. But now the fields, the woods, the gardens, have each their concert, and the ear of man is for ever regaled by creatures who seem only to please themselves. Even the ears that are deaf to the gospel are continually entertained, though without knowing it, by sounds for which they are solely indebted to its author. There is somewhere in infinite space, a world that does not roll within the precincts of mercy, and as it is reasonable, and even scriptural to suppose, that there is music in heaven, in those dismal regions perhaps the reverse of it is found: tones so dismal, as to make woe itself more VOL. III. NO. XX. insupportable, and to acuminate even despair. There is no one article of this world's comforts, with which, as Falstaff says, the poor are so heinously unprovided as bedding. When a poor woman, and an honest one, whom we know well, carried home two pair of blankets, a pair for herself and husband, and a pair for her six children, as soon as the children saw them, they jumped out of their straw, caught them in their arms, kissed them, blessed them, and danced for joy. An old woman, a very old one, the first night that she found herself so comfortably covered, could not sleep a wink, being kept awake by the contrary emotions of transport on the one hand, and the fear of not being thankful enough on the other. I wrote the poem on truth to inculcate the eleemosynary character of the gospel, as a dispensation of mercy, in the most absolute sense of the word, to the exclusion of all claims of merit on the part of the receiver; consequently to set the brand of invalidity upon the plea of works, and to discover, upon scriptural ground, the absurdity of that notion, which includes a solecism in the very terms of it, that man, by repentance and good works, may deserve the mercy of his Maker. I call it a solecism, because mercy deserved ceases to be mercy, and must take the name of justice. This is the opinion which I said in my last, the world would not acquiesce in, but except this, I do not recollect that I have introduced a syllable into any of my pieces that they can possibly object to; and even this I have endeavoured to deliver from doctrinal dryness by as many pretty things, in the way of trinket and plaything, as I could muster upon the subject. So that if I have rubbed their gums, I have taken care to do it with a coral, and even 5 |