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ject? Is it not, in some measure, the first art which they are made to study, by giving the doll into their hands? The toys of infancy are frequently only the means of conveying disguised instruction united to that age.

Dress, in general, seems to be naturally so important to, I will not say women only, but even men, that among the Lacedæmonians, who certainly gave little encouragement to coquetry, young persons were permitted, by way of encourage. ment or reward, to ornament their habits and arms. They perfumed themselves, and carefully adjusted their hair, on the evening preceding a battle; and when they were drawn up to engage their enemies, the king, after having caused the song of Castor to be played, ordered them to crown their heads with chaplets of flowers.

At Rome, even at the time when her manners were most austere, the senate, on a very extraordinary emergency, in some manner authorized and consecrated a taste for dress. The vengeance of Coriolanus, as is well known, was subdued by the entreaties of his mother and his wife, and Rome was indebted solely to their tears for her safety and her liberty. What did the senate in this case? Did it decree crowns, statues, and public homage? Nothing of these. To discharge the debt of the country to the amiable sex, it passed a solemn decree, permitting the Roman ladies to add a new ornament to their dress. The love of dress, it may indeed be admitted, is generally a proof of frivolity of mind: but we should judge wrong, were we to suppose it an invariable sign of effeminacy or want of courage: nay, it is an error to imagine it incompatible even with genius and exalted sentiments. Alcibiades, the disciple of Socrates, was the best-dressed and most fashionable man of his time. But though he was elegant and polite at Athens, delicate and voluptuous in Jonia, and sumptuous with the satrap Tissaphernes, he could live at La

cedæmon with all the austerity of the most rigid Spartan, and was a great general at the head of armies. The famous Hortensius, the rival of Cicero, was one of the most cele. brated petit-maîtres of antiquity. He was generally esteemed as a model of Roman eloquence and fashionable extravagance. He is said to have commenced an action against a careless fellow, who in passing him had disordered the folds of his robe. The ridicule which this great orator did not fear to encounter in this instance is a remarkable proof of the importance which he annexed to his dress.

There was at Rome, in the time of Quintus Flaminius, a Messenian, named Dinocrates, a man addicted to all the fopperies, and immersed in all the most fashionable luxuries of the age. One day, after having, at a sumptuous entertainment, feasted on the most delicate dishes, and drunk deeply of the most costly wines, he put on a very effeminate dress, and went to a ball at which Pleasure and the graces presided. When this was over, the elegant fop mounted a curricle of that time, and, humming the most fashionable air of the day, drove to the house of Flaminius, to request his assistance in executing a plan he had formed for detaching Messina from the Achæan league.

"I will consider of it," said Flaminius: "it is certainly well conceived; but I could not have imagined that a person who would dance in the dress in which you now appear could have been capable of forming a plan of such magnitude."

The history of the French revo lution will furnish more than one example of similar versatility and seeming contrariety of character. The promenades and spectacles of Paris, the walks of Bagatelle or Tivoli, have exhibited more than one Dinocrates. More than one Alchibiades, accustomed to all the enjoyments of luxury, all the delicacies of voluptuousness, has been seen, when oppressed by poverty, or proscribed by tyranny, to renounce, with heroic

indifference, his perfumes and his pleasures; and when brought to the scaffold, to die like Socrates or Malesherbes.

Experience therefore proves, that a taste for dress does not preclude acute ideas, or extinguish noble and generous sentiments; and if the most illustrious men did not endeavour to dissemble this taste, and the most austere nations did not fear to encourage it, why should it be condemned in those who live in an age like the present?

SIR,

For the Literary Magazine.

THE PRAISE OF TIME.

To the Editor, c.

FOR ages past, Time has been the subject of reproaches and invectives; he has been treated as the universal destroyer, accused of overturning every thing, ruining the most solid monuments, leading in his train old age and death, and, in fine, covering the world with ravages and ruins. Let us endeavour to vindicate this venerable power from the injustice of his calumniators, by showing that, if he is the author of some inevitable evils, he amply compensates for it by the numerous benefits which he bestows on mankind.

Let us follow man from his birth to the tomb. Time enables him to walk and speak. By Time his limbs are strengthened and his organs developed. By the aid of Time he adorns his mind with the various knowledge that may contribute to his happiness. His heart speaks, his passions awaken, accumulate, and swell; the storm arises; and the disturbed mind, the sport of a thousand contrary winds, is dashed from rock to rock at the mercy of the waves. In vain Reason presents her torch, the thick clouds obscure its light; this compass itself, agitated by the tempest, serves only to lead astray, by its frequent oscil

VOL. VIII. NO. XLVI.

lations.

Who then appeases the multitudinous billows? who re-establishes the calm, and conducts the shipwrecked mariner to a safe harbour?-Time. Time alone extinguishes the flame of desire, represses the tumult of the passions, and at length restores tranquility and happiness to the heart of man.

Should the fortune of any one not be sufficient to his wants, whatever exertions he may make, the competence and ease to which he aspires can only be acquired by the aid of Time. Time alone can by degrees make known his merit, and open to him the road to honours and lucrative employments.

Celia complains that Time has withered her charms. But has she not been sufficiently indemnified for this loss? An equivocal conduct had cast on her reputation a disagreeable stain. Time has caused her faults to be forgotten, and restored her to respect and esteem. Her heart was consumed by a frantic passion for an ungrateful object, and her life became a torment to her. Time has destroyed the enchantment, and given again tranquility to her soul. A cruel malady

slowly undermined her wasting frame; every remedy failed; Time alone has been able to make a perfect cure.

Maria has lost a beloved husband. Her friends in vain attempted to console her: they but irritated her grief. Time, with beneficent hand, has shed his soothing balm into her ulcerated heart; and Maria, forgetting the dead, has resumed, in favour of the living, her former gaiety and charms.

Henry sought to please the young and amiable Clara. In vain he displayed all the accomplishments which nature and education had bestowed on him; all his efforts were fruitless. Henry had recourse to Time; and Time softened the heart of his mistress, put a period to her rigours, and crowned the wishes of the fortunate Henry.

Freeport was overwhelmed with debts. He called a meeting of his

creditors, who granted him the time he requested. Time brought on the death of a relation to whom he was heir, enabled him to marry a rich and handsome widow, and, in consequence, to pay his creditors. By the aid of Time every thing is done; but, without Time, nothing. "I would undertake your business," says a friend to you, "but I have not time." Why does this literary work contain so many errors? Because the author did not employ the time necessary to render it correct. Why is my eulogium on Time so short, when the subject furnishes such ample materials for enlargement? Because I have not time to say more.

HILARIO.

For the Literary Magazine.

LIFE OF GODFRED AUGUSTUS BURGER.

THE poet, says Burger, in one of his prefaces, lays no claim in the scale of being to the rank of a sun; he is content with the humbler, harmless, welcome offices of the zephyr. What, though he neither move the mills of manufacture, nor the ships of commerce, he may unfold the petals of the sweetest flowers, and kindle the flush of ripeness on the most delicious fruits; he may fan the brow of weary toil, or lap in Elysian airs the strolling enthusiast of nature. Well may he expect then at his tomb the sigh of regret, the cypress-wreath of elegy, and the biographic memorial of posthumous admiration.

Godfred Augustus was the second child and only son of the lutheran minister John Godfred Burger, by his wife Gertrude Elizabeth, whose maiden name was Baner. He was born in 1748, on new year's day, at Wolmerswende, in the German principality of Halberstadt, and inherited with the indolence of his father the talents of his mother. His early progress was inconsiderable.

At ten years of age he could barely read and write. But he had a good memory: he learned by heart, and repeated with ease, many of Luther's hymns, and other pious fragments. He read the bible with delight: the historical books, the prophets, and psalms, and especially the apocalypse, were turned over by him daily with renewed pleasure.

To these hymns of Luther he ascribed, in after life, the hint of that impressive popularity which characterized his ballads. He had always an ear for rhythm, and, while a boy, would indicate and blame the lines which had half a foot too much, or which were so constructed as to throw on distinct syllables the ictus of the scanner and emphasis of the reader. By a kind of instinct he knew already what interfered with effect. He loved to stroll alone about a wild uninclosed heath near his father's home. He was ordered to carry a Latin grammar in his pocket, and to learn his declensions. The first rudiments his mother attempted to teach him.

He was next entrusted to the care of a neighbouring preacher; but so averse was he to this kind of application, that after two years he did not know his grammar, and was forced to withdraw as a dunce incapable of literary culture.

In 1760, his grandfather put him to a boarding-school at Aschersleben, under the rector Auerbach. Here young Burger learned something, and exerted his talent for versification in a poem on the fire that happened in the spring of 1764 at Aschersleben, which advantageously displays both his metrical and pious turn of mind. An epigram on the usher's bag-wig, which the poet's school-fellows repeated with troublesome and seditious complacency, soon after occasioned his expulsion as a ringleader in this petty insurrection against authority.

He was next sent to the university of Hallé, to study theology. This was not the profession of his choice, but his choice of this profession was the condition of his grandfather's boun

ty. He accordingly went through the routine of instruction, and once preached in a village near Hallé. But his acquaintance while at this college with Klotze, a man of literary attainments and free manners, brought on Burger a reputation for libertinism, which, in the then state of protestant Germany, was supposed incompatible with the pastoral office. Even his grandfather thought it necessary he should relinquish the holy profession for the study of the law, and accordingly consented to his removal to Gottingen for that purpose, in the Easter term of 1768. To jurisprudence he applied with assiduity, and became well versed in the Pandects; but experience had taught him no discretion in respect to his personal conduct. The lodgings which Klotze recommended he took at Gottingen, and again made a noise by his dissoluteness, which provoked his grand-father to withdraw his patronage. Poor and a rake, it was difficult not to incur a style of living repulsive to mere acquaintance, and disgusting even to the tolerance of friendship. Biester, Sprengel, and Boie, were among those friends who valued in Burger the good qualities which still remained to him, and who conferred on his adversity what it admitted of consolation. For Biester he was conceived to feel; to Boie he was thought to owe predilection.

A humorous poetical epistle to Sprengle, requiring back a great coat left at his rooms, and the drinking song, Herr Bacchus ist ein braver Mann, were then considered as indicating the natural line of pursuit for his literary talents. Pecuniary distress had made him sensible of the necessity of exertion; for the fear of want is a stronger stimulus than the hope of remote advancement.

It was now that he first read with ardour the ancient classics, and that he applied to the modern languages with assiduity. English, French, Italian, Spanish, all yielded to his efforts. With Burger and his com

panions Shakspeare became so favourite an author, that they agreed, one April night, to have a frolic in honour of his birth-day, at which all the conversation should be conducted in quotations from the English dramatist. Baron Rielmansegge was their host, and so glibly would his guests repeat with sir Toby, "Art any thing but a steward? Dost thou think there shall be no more cakes and ale?" that by the hour of sepa ration their turbulence drew the attention of the police, and they had to "rub their chain with crumbs." [Dass sie ihren Rausch auf dem Career ausschlasen mufsten.] Burger delighted also in Spanish literature, and composed in that language an original story, which Boie still pos

sesses.

Gotter, a young man, formed by the study of French models to a love of correct and polished versification, came to Gottingen in 1769, and associated with Burger and his friends.. He had brought with him a Parisian Almanack of the Muses, and took pleasure in exhibiting those pencilgeraniums, with which the Gressets, the Dorats, and the Pezais, had stocked this annual anthology. To Gotter, Burger attached himself greatly, and in his society certainly acquired considerable taste: in short, his natural tendency to the exorbitant, the extravagant, the eccentric, was somewhat pruned away. They formed in concert a German Almanack of the Muses. Rastner, the epigrammatist, promised them his assistance; Boie was alert in his solicitations for contribution, and obtained, in a trip to Berlin, the avowed patronage of the German Horace, Ramler, a friend the more important, as he had access to the directories of periodical criticism. Under such auspices the Almanack of the Muses was not only likely to merit but to obtain speedy popularity. It accordingly succeeded to admiration, and continued from 1770 to 1775, under the same management, with annually increasing reputation.

Burger envied, as he says in some

of his letters, the correctness and ease of his friend Gotter's versification to him all he produced was carried for criticism, and was at first sturdily defended against objections, but much was always altered eventually in deference to the judgment of the censor. Flushed with the glow of animation, Burger would often present his verses with the comic entreaty, for this once not to find any fault; yet he was best pleased with a captious commentary, which put every epithet to the torture. Thus he gradually accomplished himself in the fine art de faire difficilement des

vers.

Throughout life he maintained that his reputation as a poet was far less a result of any unusual talent in him, than of the perpetual use of the file, meaning by that, the extraordinary pains he bestowed on all his compositions: his best poems, he said, were precisely those which had cost him most labour. He would alter not merely words and lines, but left scarcely one vestige of his first composition. A translation of the Hameau of Bernard, and another most masterly one of the Pervigilium Vencris, were among the exercitations which Burger chronicled in the German Muses' Almanack. The comic ballad Europa is also his, although the loose turn of the story occasioned him to suppress his usual signature.

In Germany it is not uncommon for polished families to bespeak a birth day ode, an epithalamium, or an elegy on those occasions which form a sort of epocha in the history of their existence. To the poet a pecuniary recompence is sent, and a splendid edition of his work is distributed among the friends of the house. The notice which Burger began to obtain occasioned many applications of this kind; and to him it was convenient, by means like these, to repair his shattered finances. Several heirs of fortune, several happy mothers, have now the pleasure of boasting, "my birth day was sung," or "my wedding was celebrated, by Burger."

In 1771 Holty, the elegiac, and Voss, the bucolick poet, Miller, author of Siegwart and Mariamne, a writer of great sensibility, and the two counts Stolberg, of whom Fre derick Leopold is the most known by poems, travels, and a romance called "The Island," came to Gottingen, as yet "youths unknown to fame." They were soon attracted by the natural magnetism of genius within the circle which had assembled round Burger; and after his removal from Gottingen, in the following year, they continued to visit his rustic retreat. It was the influence of Boie which obtained for Burger, in 1772, a sort of stewardship of the manor of Alten Gleichen, under the noble family of Usler. The acceptance of the place occasioned a reconciliation between the poet and his grandfather, who was willing to encourage this symptom of economic care and returning prudence, by paying off the debts incurred at Gottingen by his grandson.

Boie was absent. A less faithful friend undertook the liquidation; nearly seven hundred dollars of this advance passed into the hands, not of Burger's creditors, but of a spendthrift associate. The student could not refund: the grandfather was inexorable; and Burger migrated to his new residence, still encumbered with college debts, which for years disturbed his repose, but which his sloth could never summon the means of discharging.

Here it was that Burger first met with Herder's dissertation on the songs of rude nations, which drew his attention to the ballads of England, and with Percy's Reliques, which immediately became his manual. These books decided for ever the character of his excellence. From a free translation of "The Friar of Orders Gray" (Bruder Graurock), and "The Child of Elle" (Die Entführung), and from an imitation of Dryden's Guiscardo and Sigismunda (Lenardo and Blandine), he rapidly passed on to the production of "The Wild Huntsman," "The Parson's Daughter," and

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