right understanding of the Scriptures; that the sciences of metaphysics, mathematics, and ethics, lead directly to deism. Mr Horne was always convinced that Sir Isaac Newton and Dr Clarke had, by introducing speculations of their own, formed a design to undermine and overthrow the theology of the Scriptures, and to bring in the Stoical anima mundi in the place of the true God; that heathenism was about to rise again in the world out of their speculations, and reputed grand discoveries in natural philosophy.

"This suspicion of an evil design in Clarke and Sir Isaac Newton, took early possession of the Bishop of Norwich's mind, and was not changed or shaken through life. It was further confirmed by reports, which he had heard, of the private good understanding between them and the sceptics of their day, as Collins, Toland, Tindall, &c.

"Our young divine, taking first a ridiculous view of the whole matter, would always consider Sir Isaac Newton's system as a dangerous attempt upon our established religion, and a palpable insult upon truth and reason. He drew a parallel between the heathen doctrines, in the Somnium Scipionis of Cicero, and the Newtonian plan of the cosmotheorial system."

"He wrote against it in advanced life, in a mild and serious pamphlet, which he called a

Fair, Candid, and impartial State of the Case between Sir Isaac Newton and Mr Hutchinson.

"It claims for the latter against the former the discovery of the true physiological causes by which, under the power of the Creator, the natural world is moved and directed."

You congratulate me in your conviction that the now long-enduring malady in my head has in no degree impaired my intellects.-Perhaps not, except that it has considerably affected my memory. Names escape me strangely, and all those prompt recollections necessary at the whist-table. These are trifling privations, only as they threaten greater.

In the course of the last winter and spring Miss Fern read to me Lord Orford's Posthumous Works, and Godwin's Life of Chaucer. His lordship's letters possess the arch-chymic power, for they turn the lead of common-life themes and domestic occurrences to sterling gold. They are a perfect luxury of wit and humour. His reminiscences familiarize us with the interior of the court of George the First and Second, and display, in full light, the numskullism of both those regal personages.

"How oft at royalty poor folk must scoff,
Were distance not the foil which sets it off!"

Lord Orford lived to laugh and to make others laugh, and his heart was kind and warm, his friendship disinterested, fervent, and steady; but all the fruits of a great and sublime imagination, whether in prose or verse, were tasteless to him.— Such are the inconsistencies in human characters. How odd it was that he should have written a tragedy upon a crime so dark and gigantic as to force his own muse into those altitudes, whither he never would follow the genius of his contemporaries.

Godwin's biographic work is, in fact, a very interesting history of the reign of our third Edward, his grandson, and of the life of the noble John of Gaunt, to whose memory our historians have, in comparison with Godwin, done so little justice. On their pages the heroes, great men, and distinguished women of that period, pass before our eyes like figures in a magic lantern Godwin places us amongst them, and we feel as if they had been our familiar acquaintance.

He enables us to sail on a full tide of political events, and of the customs and manners, arts and sciences, of an epoch emerging from barbarian darkness; but this author is insanely partial to the poetic powers of Chaucer, whose compositions, allowing for the disadvantage of obsolete language, have so little good which is not trans

lation, and so much that is tedious, unnatural, conceited, and obscure. Amid scenes and circumstances, so much more interesting than any which appertain to Chaucer, the poet pops up his nose at intervals, like a wooden buoy, floating, sinking, and rising, amongst a throng of gallant boats and vessels, on the billows of the ocean. Adieu!

LETTER XLVIII.

REV. T. S. WHALLEY of Bath.

Lichfield, June 12, 1806.

You are right, Ashbourn Hall has been overpraised, nor do I wonder to see you writing that you looked in vain in the walks, the canal, and amid the plantations, for proofs of Sir Brooke Boothby's celebrated taste, and for visual evidence of the many thousands which he is said to have expended on that ancestral spot.

You did not examine the house where I think Sir Brooke displayed more happy contrivance and elegant fancy, than in the disposition of the pleasure-grounds. It has one peculiar apartment

on the ground-floor. It is two rooms laid into one, which, as he could not elevate the ceiling, had wanted height, if he had not produced the effect of good proportion by a columnar chimneypiece in the middle, whose smoke is taken off by horizontal flues. There is a grate on each side, and an arch to right and left, through which the company pass and repass, without losing sight of each other. A conservatory, the whole length of this double apartment, is divided from it by large sash windows, which open and shut at pleasure, while the room is lighted by windows opposite to each other, at the two extremities.

On your next day's exploring 1 trust you were less disappointed; yet you probably thought that Ileham wanted variety and Dovedale foliage; but, I think, there was no disappointment at Matlock, and I am sure there was none in the genuine boast of Gothic architecture at York. If it possessed such a free and lawny area as surrounds Lichfield cathedral, and looked into such a lovely green vale as it commands, York-Minster might indeed say, what even yet she has a right to say, "I am, and there is none beside me;" that is in the poetic sense, for in the literal one we know there are many beside it, smoky and squalid mansions, that crowd up to the magnificent struc