BRITISH SPY.

LETTER X.

RICHMOND, DECEMBER 10.

IN one of my late rides into the surrounding country, I stopped at a little inn, to refresh myself and horse; and as the landlord was neither a Boniface nor "mine host of the garter," I called for a book, by way of killing time, while the preparations for my repast were going forward. He brought me a shattered fragment of the second volume of the Spectator, which he told me was the only book in the house, for "he never troubled his head about reading ;" and by the way of couclusive proof, he farther informed me, that this fragment, the only book in the house, had been sleeping, unmolested, in the dust of his mantle-piece for ten or fifteen years. I could not meet my venerable countryman in a foreign land, and in this humiliating plight, nor hear of the inhuman and gothick contempt with which he had been treated, without the liveliest emotion. So I read my host a lecture on the subject; to which he appeared to pay as little attention as he had before done to the Spectator and

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with the sang froid of a Dutchman, answered me, in the cant of the country, that he "had other fish to fry," and left me.

It had been so long, since I had an opportunity of opening that agreeable collection, that the few numbers now left before me, appeared entirely new; and I cannot describe to you the avidity and delight with which I devoured those beautiful and interesting speculations. Is it not strange, my dear S*******, that such a work should have ever lost an inch of ground? A style so sweet and simple; and yet so ornamented! A temper so benevolent, so cheerful, so exhilirating! A body of knowledge, and of original thought, so immense and various ! So strikingly just, so universally useful! What person, of any sex, temper, calling, or pursuit, can possibly converse with the Spectator, without being conscious of immediate improvement? To the spleen, he is a perpetual and never failing antidote, as he is to ignorance and immorality.-No matter for the disposition of mind in which you take him up; you smile at the wit, laugh at the drollery, feel your mind enlightened, your heart opened, softened and refined, and when you lay him down you are sure to be in better humour both with yourself and every body else. I have never mentioned the subject to a reader of the Spectator, who did not admit this to be the invariable process and in such a world of misfortunes, of cares, and

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sorrows, and guilt as this is, what a prize would this collection be, if it were rightly estimated! Were I the sovereign of a nation which spoke the English language and wished my subjects cheerful, virtuous and enlightened, I would furnish every poor family in my dominions (and see that the rich furnish themselves) with a copy of the Spectator; and ordain that the parents or children should tead four or five numbers, aloud, every night in the year. For one of the peculiar perfections of the work is, that while it contains such a mass of ancient and modern learning, so much of profound wisdom and of beautiful composition, yet there is scarcely a number throughout the eight volumes which is not level to the meanest capacity. Another perfection is, that the Spectator will never become tiresome to any one whose taste and whose heart remain uncorrupted.

I do not mean that this author should be read to the exclusion of others ;-much less that he should stand in the way of the generous pursuit of science, or interrupt the discharge of social or private duties. All the councils of the work itself have a directly reverse tendency. It furnishes a store of the clearest argument and of the most amiable and captivating exhortations, "to raise the genius and to mend the heart." I regret, only, that such a book should be thrown by, and almost entirely forgotten, while the gilded blasphemies of infidels and "noon-tide

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traces" of pernicious theorists are hailed with rapture and echoed around the world. For such, I should be pleased to see the Spectator universally substituted; and, throwing out of the question its morality, its literary information, its sweetly contagious serenity, and the pure and chaste beauties of its style; and considering it merely as a curiosity, as concentering the brilliant sports of the finest cluster of geniuses that ever graced the earth, it surely deserves perpetual attention, respect and consecration.

There is, methinks, my S*******, a great fault in the world as it respects this subject; a giddy instability, a light and fluttering vanity, a prurient longing after novelty, an impatience, a disgust, a fastidious contempt of every thing that is old. You will not understand me as censuring the progress of sound science. I am not so infatuated an antiquarian, nor so poor a philanthropist as to seek to retard the expansion of the human mind. But I'lament the eternal oblivion into which our old authors, those giants of literature, are permitted to sink, while the world stands open-eyed and open-mouthed, to catch every modern, tinseled abortion, as it falls from the press. In the small circles of America for instance, perhaps there is no want of taste and even zeal for letters. I' have seen several gentlemen who appear to have an accurate, a minute acquaintance with the whole range of literature in its present

state of improvement; yet you will be surprised to hear that I have not met with more than one or two persons in this country who have ever read the works of Bacon or of Boyle. They delight to saunter in the upper story, sustained and adorned as it is, with the delicate proportions, the foliage and flourishes of the Corinthian order; but they disdain to make any acquaintance or hold communication at all, with the Tuscan and Dorick plainness and strength, which base and support the whole edifice. As to lord Verulam, when he is considered as the father of experimental philosophy; as the champion whose vigour battered down the idolized chimeras of Aristotle, together with all the appendant and immeasurable webs of the brain woven, and hung upon them by the in genious dreamers of the schools; as the hero who not only rescued and redeemed the world from all this darkness, jargon, perplexity and errour; but, from the stores of his own great mind, poured a flood of light upon the earth, straitened the devious paths of science, and planned the whole paradise, which we now find so full of fragrance, beauty, and grandeur-when he is considered, I say, in these points of view, I am astonished that literary gentlemen do not court his acquaintance, if not through reverence, at least through curiosity. The person, who does, so will find every period filled with pure, solid, golden bullion; that bullion