They are such as I forbid him to sing in our house, but connive at him doing it when he is in others'; particularly at the inns, where they always obtain me the best wine and most gladsome attendance. In fact, I have ever found that, when my horses came out of a stable where he had been singing, they neighed the louder, and trotted the faster, and made a prouder display of their oats.

Burnet. I remember one of them, from its being more reasonable than the invocations of a lover usually are. Either they talk of tears, which they ought to be ashamed of as men and Christians, or of death, when the doctor has told them no such thing; or they run wild among the worst imps and devils of the Gentiles, for in truth they are no better, whatever forms they assumed, - Nymphs or Graces or what

not.

Hardcastle. Pray, my lord bishop, if there is no impropriety in asking it, might I request a copy of those verses?

Burnet. Truly, sir, I keep none of such a girl's-eye sampler. I will attempt to recollect the words, which, I own it, pleased me by their manfulness, as demonstrating that your Uncle. Hum, though a loosish man and slippery in foul proclivities, was stout and resolute with the sluts in his wiser moments, calling them what they ought to be called at the first word.

'Listen, mad girl! since giving ear
May save the eyes hard work:
Tender is he who holds you dear,
But proud as pope or Turk."

Now Hum hated paganism and iniquity; and nothing could stir him from his church, though he attended it but seldom. He proceeds thus:

"Some have been seen, whom people thought

Much prettier girls than you,"

Observe, he will be reasonable, and bring the creature to her senses if he can:

Setting a lover's tears at nought,

Like any other dew;

"And some too have been heard to swear,

While with wet lids they stood,

No man alive was worth a tear:
They never wept - nor wou'd.”

Resolute! ay! False creatures False creatures; he sounded them, even the deepest. There is something about these wantons black as hell, and they cannot help showing it.

Hardcastle. I thank your lordship, as much for your reflections as for my uncle's poetry.

Burnet. I wish he had left behind him the experience he must have paid dear for, that it might serve to admonish the sprigs and sparks (as they are called) of our unhappy times, and purify the pestilence they are breathing. Formerly, we know from Holy Writ, the devils ran out of men into swine, and pushed down in those fit bodies to the sea. It now ap

pears that they were still snifting and hankering after their old quarters; and we find them rushing again into men, only the stronger and hungrier, the ungovernabler and uncleanlier, for so much salt-water bathing.

Hardcastle. I am afraid, my lord bishop, you have too much reason for this severe remark. My uncle, I knew, was somewhat of a libertine; but I never had heard before that he was such a poet, and could hardly have imagined that he approached near enough to Mr. Cowley for jealousy or competition.

Burnet. Indeed, they who discoursed on such matters were of the same opinion, excepting some few, who see nothing before them and every thing behind. These declared that Hum would overtop Abraham, if he could only drink rather less, think rather more, and feel rather rightlier; that he had great spunk and spirit, and that not a fan was left upon a lap when any one sang his airs. Lucretius tells us that there is a plant on Helicon so pestiferous that it kills by the odor of its flowers. It appears that these flowers are now collected by our young women for their sweet-pots, and that the plant itself is naturalized among us, and blossoming in every parlor window. Poets, like ministers of state, have their parties, and it is difficult to get at truth upon questions not capable of demonstration nor founded on matter of fact. To take any trouble about them is an unwise thing. It is like mounting a wall covered with broken glass: you cut your fingers before you reach the top, and you only discover at last that it is, within a span or two, of equal height on both sides. To sit as an arbitrator between two contending poets, I should consider just as foolish as to take the same

position and office between two game-cocks, if it were at the same time as wicked. I say as wicked; for I am firmly of opinion that those things are the foolishest which are the most immoral. The greatest of stakes, mundanely speaking, is the stake of reputation: hence he who hazards the most of it against a viler object is the most irrational and insane. I do not understand rightly in what the greatness of your poets, and such like, may be certified to rest. Who would have imagined that the youth who was carried to his long home the other day I mean my Lord Rochester's reputed child, Mr. George Nelly- was for several seasons a great poet? Yet I remember the time when he was so famous a one that he ran after Mr. Milton up Snow-hill, as the old gentleman was leaning on his daughter's arm from the Poultry, and, treading down the heel of his shoe, called him a rogue and a liar; while another poet sprang out, clapping his hands and crying, "Bravely done, by Beelzebub ! the young cock spurs the blind buzzard gallantly!" On a scrivener representing to Mr. George the respectable character of Mr. Milton, and the probability that at some future time he might be considered as among our geniuses, and such as would reflect a certain portion of credit on his ward, and asking him withal why he appeared to him a rogue and a liar, he replied, "I have proofs known to few: I possess a sort of drama by him, entitled Comus, which was composed for the entertainment of Lord Pembroke, who held an appointment under the king; and this John hath since changed sides, and written in defence of the Commonwealth."

Mr. George began with satirizing his father's friends, and confounding the better part of them with all the hirelings and nuisances of the age; with all the scavengers of lust, and all the link-boys of literature; with Newgate solicitors, the patrons of adulterers and forgers, who, in the long vacation, turn a penny by puffing a ballad, and are promised a shilling in silver for their own benefit, on crying down a religious tract. He soon became reconciled to them, and they raised him upon their shoulders above the heads of the wittiest and the wisest. This served a whole winter. Afterward, whenever he wrote a bad poem, he supported his sinking fame by some signal act of profligacy: an elegy by a seduction, a heroic by an adultery, a tragedy by a divorce. On the re

mark of a learned man, that irregularity is no indication of genius, he began to lose ground rapidly, when on a sudden he cried out at the Haymarket, There is no God! It was then surmised more generally and more gravely that there was something in him, and he stood upon his legs almost to the last. Say what you will, once whispered a friend of mine, there are things in him strong as poison and original as sin. Doubts, however, were entertained by some, on more mature reflection, whether he earned all his reputation by his aphorism; for soon afterward he declared at the Cockpit that he had purchased a large assortment of cutlasses and pistols, and that, as he was practising the use of them from morning to night, it would be imprudent in persons who were without them either to laugh or to boggle at the Dutch vocabulary with which he had enriched our language. In fact, he had invented new rhymes in profusion, by such words as trackschuyt, Wageninghen, Skiermonikoog, Bergen-op-Zoom, and whatever is appertaining to the market-places of fish, flesh, fowl, flowers, and legumes, not to omit the dockyards and barracks and ginshops, with various kinds of essences and drugs.

Now, Mr. Hardcastle, I would not censure this: the idea is novel, and does no harm; but why should a man push his neck into a halter to sustain a catch or glee?

Having had some concern in bringing his reputed father to a sense of penitence for his offences, I waited on the youth likewise in a former illness, not without hope of leading him ultimately to a better way of thinking. I had hesitated too long: I found him far advanced in his convalescence. My arguments are not worth repeating. He replied thus: "I change my mistresses as Tom Southern his shirt, from economy. I cannot afford to keep few; and I am determined not to be forgotten till I am vastly richer. But I assure you, Doctor Burnet, for your comfort, that if you imagine I am led astray by lasciviousness, as you call it, and lust, you are quite as much mistaken as if you called a book of arithmetic a bawdy book. I calculate on every kiss I give, modest or immodest, on lip or paper. I ask myself one question only: What will it bring me?" On my marvelling and raising up my hands, "You churchmen," he added with a laugh, “are too hot in all your quarters for the calm and steady contemplation of this high mystery."

He spake thus loosely, Mr. Hardcastle, and I confess I was disconcerted and took my leave of him. If I gave him any offence at all, it could only be when he said, "I should be sorry to die before I had written my life;" and I replied, "Rather say, before you have mended it."

But, doctor," continued he, "the work I propose may hring me a hundred pounds." Whereunto I rejoined, "That which I, young gentleman, suggest in preference will be worth much more to you."

At last he is removed from among the living. Let us hope the best; to wit, that the mercies which have begun with man's forgetfulness will be crowned with God's forgiveness.

Hardcastle. I perceive, my lord bishop, that writers of perishable fame may leave behind them something worth collecting. Represented to us by historians like your lordship, we survey a light character as a film in agate, and a noxious one as a toad in marble.

Burnet. How near together, Mr. Hardcastle, are things which appear to us the most remote and opposite ! - how near is death to life, and vanity to glory! How deceived are we, if our expressions are any proofs of it, in what we might deem the very matters most subject to our senses! The haze above our heads we call the heavens, and the thinnest of the air the firmament.

IV. THE ABBÉ DELILLE AND WALTER LANDOR.

THE Abbé Delille was the happiest of creatures, when he could weep over the charms of innocence and the country in some crowded and fashionable circle at Paris. We embraced most pathetically on our first meeting there, as if the one were condemned to quit the earth, the other to live upon it.

Delille. You are reported to have said that descriptive poetry has all the merits of a handkerchief that smells of roses?

Landor. This, if I said it, is among the things which are