and attention necessary. An attention, and a care, that have injured her health, and which, had she not been uncommonly supported, must have brought her to the grave. But I will pass to another subject; it would be cruel to particularize only to give pain, neither would I by any means give a sable hue to the first letter of a correspondence so unexpectedly renewed.

I am delighted with what you tell me of my uncle's good health; to enjoy any measure of cheerfulness at so late a day is much, but to have that late day enlivened with the vivacity of youth, is much more, and in these postdiluvian times a rarity indeed. "Happy for the most part, are the parents who have daughters. Daughters are not apt to outlive their natural affections, which a son has generally survived even before his boyish years are expired. I rejoice particularly in my uncle's felicity, who has three female descendants from his little person, who leave him nothing to wish for upon that head.

My dear cousin, dejection of spirits, which I suppose may have prevented many a man from becoming an author, made me one. I find constant employment necessary, and therefore take care to be constantly employed. Manual occupations do not engage the mind sufficiently, as I know by experience, having tried many. But composition, especially of verse, absorbs it wholly. I write therefore generally three hours in a morning, and in an evening I transcribe. I read also, but less than I write, for I must have bodily exercise, and therefore never pass a day without it.

You ask me where I have been this summer. I answer, at Olney. Should you ask me where I spent the last seventeen summers, I should still answer, at Olney. Ay, and the winter also, I have seldom left it, and except when I attended my brother in his last illness, never I believe a fortnight together.

Adien, my beloved cousin; I shall not always be thus nimble in reply, but shall always have great pleasure in answering you when I can. Yours, my friend and cousin,

W. COWPER.

ACCOUNT OF BOETHIUS.

THE senator Boethius is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman. As a wealthy orphan, he inherited the patrimony and honours of the Anician family, a name ambitiously assumed by the kings and emperors of the age; and the appeilation of Manlius asserted his genuine or fabulous descent from a race of consuls and dictators, who had repulsed the Gauls from the Capitol, and sacrificed their sons to the discipline of the republic. In the youth of Boethius, the studies of Rome were not totally abandoned; a Virgil is now extant, corrected by the hand of a consul; and the professors of grammar, rhetoric, and jurisprudence, were maintained in their privileges and pensions, by the liberality of the Goths. But the erudition of the Latin language was insufficient to satiate his ardent curiosity; and Boethius is said to have employed eighten laborious years in the schools of Athens, which were supported by the zeal, the learning, and the diligence of Proclus and his disciples. The reason and piety of their Roman pupil were fortunately saved from the contagion of mystery and magic, which polluted the groves of the academy; but he imbibed the spirit, and imitated the method of his dead and living masters, who attempted to reconcile the strong and subtle sense of Aristotle with the devout contemplation an I sublime fancy of Plato. After his return to Rome, and his marriage with the daughter of his friend, the patrician Symmachus, Boethius still continued, in

a palace of ivory and marble, to prosecute the same studies. The church was edified by his profound defence of the orthodox creed against the Arian, the Eutychian, and the Nestorian heresies; and the Catholic unity was explained or exposed in a formal treatise by the indifference of three distinct though consubstantial persons. For the benefit of his Latin readers, his genius submitted to teach the first elements of the arts and sciences of Greece. The geometry of Euclid, the music of Pythagoras, the arithmetic of Nichomachus, the mechanics of Archimedes, the astronomy of Ptolemy, the theology of Plato, and the logic of Aristotle, with the commentary of Porphyry, were translated and illustrated by the indefatigable pen of the Roman senator. And he alone was esteemed capable of describing the wonders of art, a sun-dial, a water-clock, or a sphere which represented the motions of the planets. From these abstruse speculations, Boethius stooped, or to speak more truly, he rose to the social duties of public and private life: the indigent were relieved by his liberality; and his eloquence, which flattery might compare to the voice of Demosthenes or Cicero, was uniformly exerted in the cause of innocence and humanity. Such conspicuous merit was felt and rewarded by a discerning prince; the dignity of Boethius was adorned with the titles of consul and patrician, and his talents were usefully employed in the important station of master of the offices. Notwithstanding the equal claims of the Fast and West, his two sons were created, in their tender youth, the consuls of the same year. On the memorable day of their inauguration, they proceeded in solemn pomp from their palace to the forum, amidst the applause of the senate and the people; and their joyful father, the true consul of Rome, after pronouncing an oration in the praise of his royal benefactor, distributed a triumphal largess in the games of the circus.

VOL. I....NO. II.

Prosperous in his fame and fortunes, in his public honours and private alliances, in the cultivation of science and the consciousness of virtue, Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.

For

A philosopher,liberal of his wealth and parsimonious of his time, might be insensible to the common allurements of ambition, the thirst of gold and employment. And some credit may be due to the asseveration of Boethius, that he had reluctantly obeyed the divine Plato,. who enjoins every virtuous citizen to rescue the state from the usurpation of vice and ignorance. the integrity of his public conduct he appeals to the memory of his country. His authority had restrained the pride and oppression of the royal officers, and his eloquence had delivered Paulianus from the dogs of the palace. He had always pitied, and often relieved, the distress of the provincials, whose fortunes were exhausted by public and private rapine; and Boethius alone had courage to oppose the tyranny of the Barbarians, elated by conquest, excited by avarice, and, as he complains, encouraged by impunity. In these honourable contests, his spirit soared above the consideration of danger, and perhaps of prudence; and we may learn from the example of Cato, that a character of pure and inflexible virtue is the most apt to be misled by prejudice, to be heated by enthusiasm, and to confound private enmities with public justice. The disciple of Plato might exaggerate the infirmities of nature, and the imperfections of society; and to the mildest form of a Gothic kingdom, even the weight of allegiance and gratitude, must be insupportable to the free spirit of a Roman patriot. But the favour and fidelity of Boethius declined in just proportion with the public happiness; and an unworthy colleague was imposed, to divide and controul the power of the master of the offices. In the

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milder torture of beating him with clubs till he expired. But his genius survived to diffuse a ray of knowledge over the darkest ages of the Latin world; the writings of the philosopher were translated by the most glorious of the English Kings, and the third emperor of the name of Otho removed to a more honourable tomb the bones of a Catholic saint, who, from his Arian persecutors, had acquired the honours of martyrdom, and the fame of miracles. In the last hours of Boethius, be derived some comfort from the safety of his two sons, of his wife, and of his father-in-law, the venerable Symmachus. But the grief of Symmachus was indiscreet, and perhaps disrespectful: he had presumed to lament, he might dare to revenge, the death of an injured friend. He was dragged in chains from Rome to the palace of Ravenna; and the suspicions of Theodoric could only be appeased by the blood of an innocent and aged sena

tor.

STORY OF CECILIA.

THE passion of love is supposed to exert its sway most despotically over the softer sex, the gentler half of our species; but though I cannot but confess that women, taken in the aggregate, are more delicate animals than men, and less capable of resolute exertion and firmness, yet there are instances among them of a firm endurance of evil, an energy of mind fully equal to the boasted strength of the stern Lords of the Creation. A woman indeed who has a soul at all, (for it is well known to be the Turkish creed that that beautiful machine is not endued with so useless a spring, and there are some instances among our own countrywomen that would almost induce one to believe that a few fair Turks had straggled into Great Britain)... a woman, I say, who has a soul, is much more animated, more alive than man. Her impulses, if less

permanent, are more lively; and though their vigour may quickly relax, yet the first spring is so powerful, that it will carry them further than a more continued impetus will lead a man....But I am going to set before my readers the character of a female, not more distinguished for her feeling than her resolution; and whose case, as it may be common to all, may contain a general warning and a general example.

Cecilia was, from her infancy, the child of misfortune. She lost her mother in the first month of her life, and experienced through her childhood every disadvantage which can attend a motherless female. It is needless to detail the circumstances which threw Cecilia, without fortune and without friends, into a dependent situation in an elegant family. There, however, we find her, from a very early age, bereft of all the splendid hopes her father's prospects once held out to her, and trusting alone to "Innocence and Heaven."

Cecilia was no beauty;....instead of the Grecian elegance of form, and the unrivalled delicacy of features she might have inherited from her lovely mother, she could boast only an active, though not a slender person, a complexion that glowed with the pure tints of health, a countenance that bespoke good humour, and an eye that beamed intelligence. Her skin had been despoiled of its polish by that foe to loveliness, the small-pox ;....and the narrowness of her fortune deprived her of the adventitious advantages of dress. The lowliness of her situation, which she felt most acutely, (perhaps too much so, since circumstances, not incurred by guilt, ought to bring no imputation with them) repressed all the freedom of her manner, and all the graces of her youth. With these exterior disadvantages, Cecilia was living with a woman of fashion, fortune, and beauty, who, satisfied with the charitable deed of affording a home to a fellow-creature, thought she