= enough to digest, connect and systematize them, and to distinguish at once, in any future combination of circumstances, the feature which gives or refuses to a principle a just application.-Without such intellectual properties, I should conjecture (for on this subject I can only conjecture) that a man could not have the fair advantage and perfect command of his reading. For in the first place, I should apprehend that he would never discover the application of a case, without the reoccurrence of all the same circumstances; in the next place that his cases would form a perfect chaos, a rudis indigestaque moles, in his brains; and lastly that he would often, and sometimes perhaps fatally, mistake the indentifying feature, and furnish his antagonist with a formidable weapon against himself. But let me fly from this entangled wilder ness of which I have so little knowledge, and conclude with Mr.********, Although when brought to the standard, of perfect oratory, he may be subject to the censures I have passed on him; yet it is to be acknowledged, and I make the acknowledgment with pleasure, that he is a man of extensive reading, a well informed lawyer, a fine belles lettres scholar, and sometimes a beautiful speaker, ****** LETTER VIII. BRITISH SPY. LETTER VIII. = JAMESTOWN, SEPTEMBER 27. I HAVE taken a pleasant ride of sixty miles down the river, in order, my dear S*******, to see the remains of the first English settlement in Virginia. The site is a very handsome one. The river is three miles broad; and, on the opposite shore, the country presents a fine range of bold and beautiful hills, But I find no vestiges of the ancient town, except the ruins of a church steeple, and a dis ordered group of old tomb stones. On one of these, shaded by the boughs of a tree whose trunk has embraced and grown over the edge of the stone, and seated on the headstone of another I grave, now address you. What a moment for a lugubrious meditation among the tombs; but fear not; I have neither the temper nor the genius of a Harvey: and, as much as I revere his pious memory, I cannot envy him the possession of such a genius and such a temper. For my own part, I would not have suffered the mournful pleasure of writing this book and Dr. Young's Night Thoughts, for all the just fame which they both have gained by those celebrated productions-much rather would I have danced and sung and played the fiddle with Yorick through the whimsical pages of Tristram Shandy; that book which every body justly censures and admires alternately, and which will continue to be read, abused and devoured, with ever fresh delight, as long as the world shall relish a joyous laugh, or a tear of the most delicious feeling. By the bye, here, on one side, is an inscription on a grave stone, which would constitute no bad theme for an occasional meditation from Yorick himself. The stone, it seems, covers the grave of a man who was born in the neighbourhood of London; and his epitaph concludes the short and rudely executed account of his birth and death, by declaring him to have been "a great sinner, in hopes of a joyful resurrection;" as if he had sinned, with no other intention, than to give himself a fair title to these exulting hopes. But awkwardly and ludicrously as the sentiment is expressed, it is, in its meaning, most just and beautiful; as it acknowledges the boundless mercy of Heaven, and glances at that divinely consoling proclamation, "come un"to me, all ye who are weary and heavy la"den, and I will give you rest." The ruin of the steeple is about thirty feet high and mantled to its very summit with ivy. It is difficult to look at this venerable object, surrounded as it is with these awful proofs of the mortality of man, without exclaiming in the pathetick solemnity of our Shakespeare, The cloud-capt towers-the gorgeous palaces Whence, my dear S*******, arises the irrepressible reverence and tender affection with which I look at this broken steeple? It is, that my soul, by a secret, subtle process, invests the mouldering ruin with her own powers; imagines it a fellow being; a venerable old man; a Nestor, or an Ossian, who has witnessed and survived the ravages of successive generations, the companions of his youth and of his maturity, and now mourns his own solitary and desolate condition, and hails their spirits in every passing cloud? Whatever may be the cause, as I look at it, I feel my soul drawn forward, as by the cords of gentlest sympathy, and involuntarily open my lips to offer consolation to the drooping pile. Where, my S*******, is the busy bustling croud which landed here two hundred years ago!-Where is Smith, that pink of gallantry, that flower of chivalry? I fancy that I can see their first slow and cautious approach to the shore; their keen and vigilant eyes piercing the forest in every direction, to How detect the lurking Indian, with his toma. hawk, bow and arrow.-Good Heavens ! What an enterprize!-How full of the most fearful perils; and yet how entirely profitless to the daring men who personally undertook and atchieved it!! Through what a series of the most spirit chilling hardships had they to toil? How often did they cast their eyes to England in vain ; and with what delusive hopes, day after day, did the little famished crew strain their sight to catch the white sail of comfort and relief! But day after day, the sun sat and darkness covered the earth; but no sail of comfort or relief came. often in the pangs of hunger, sickness, solitude and disconsolation, did they think of London; her shops, her markets groaning under the weight of plenty, her streets swarming with gilded coaches, bustling hacks and with crouds of lords, dukes and commons with healthy, busy contented faces, of every description, and among them none more healthy or more contented than those of their ungrateful and improvident directors ! But now where are they, all-the little famished colony which landed here, and the many coloured croud of London-where are they, my dear S*******? Gone, where there is no distinction; consigned to the common earth. Another generation succeeded them; which, just as busy and as bustling as that which fell before it, has sunk down into the same nothingness.-Another |