existence by about sixty years, and to figure away at the coronation of George the Third, instead of that of his worthy successor, whom God long preserve. Ossian himself, that apocryphal personage, and the Boy of Bristol, would have created less controversy and contention. It would have given a kind of St Vitus's dance to every limb of the mighty body of letters, and would have operated like an electrical shock. In short, good reader, you may probably have observed, if you are in the habit of making use of soda powders, the effect which is produced by the infusion of cold water on the particles as they lie scattered at the bottom of the glass. The cold and translucid lymph, late so calm and motionless, effervesces instantaneously, and boils upwards in foaming agitation, moved as if by a spirit. Such and so potent would have been the effect of one Number of our astonishing Miscellany. The names of O'Doherty, Kempferhausen, Wastle, Timothy Tickler, and Lauerwinckel, must certainly ever preclude imitators; yet there were unquestionably many men of that period to which we have alluded, whom we think we could have made something of in the way of contributors. There was Johnson, for instance. To be sure his style is not of the fittest for our airy and etherial pages, and his wit is rather too clumsy for us, who delight more to use the razor than the hatchet. Properly trained, however, we think the old fellow might have been made to do great things. We have a notion he could have written a very forcible letter, though a Cockney himself, on Cockneys and Cockneyism, and occasionally we might have suffered him to take up, in conjunction with our friend, Timothy Tickler, the reviewing department of our work, provided the subject was not poetry; his Rasselas, after being entirely rewritten by ourselves, we might probably have inserted, but his Ramblers we should have taken the liberty of declining. As for Goldsmith, he would have just done for us. All our readers, we dare say, remember his account of the Common Council-man's visit to see the coronation of George the Third. In what an admirable spirit is it written! We should actually not have been ashamed of inserting it in our Magazine. Hear but Mr Grograms consultations with his wife.

"Grizzle," said I to her, "Grizzle, my dear, consider that you are but weakly, always ailing, and will never bear sitting out all night upon the scaffold. You remember what a cold you caught the last fast day, by rising but half an before your time to go to church, and how I was scolded as the cause of it. Besides, my dear, our daughter, Anna Amelia Wilhelmina Carolina will look like a perfect fright if she sits up, and you know the girl's face is something, at her time of life, considering her fortune is but small. Mr Grogram,' replied my wife, Mr Grogram, this is always the case when you find me in spirits. I don't want to go out, I own, I don't care whe ther I go at all; it is seldom that I am in spirits, but this is always the case. In short, sir, what will you have on't?

Poor

-to the coronation we went." Goldy, he would have written an excellent series for our Magazine, and we would have paid him handsomely. What a pity he did not live in the days of Blackwood. Burke, too, would have been of some use to us in any political department. To be sure he was rather whiggish at his outset, but we could have fully satisfied him, we think, as to this point. A letter or two of his to certain noble lords, whom we have in view, would have suited us exactly. Churchhill, it must be acknowledged, was a sad fellow-relentlessly indiscriminate in abusive satire; his only excuse is, that he did not live within the period of our publication. He was, however, an engine of power, though improperly directed, and we could have turned him, we think, to very considerable use. What a fine character he would have drawn of the amiable Scotsman! How minutely would he have marked the different features of this Ursa Major, and how glowingly he would have coloured the whole. He would have transfixed him in the very act of shedding the venom of his spleen over the brightest characters of his country. Gray would have done very well for the Diletante Society, and very well for our Magazine. He was a man of taste, and of habits of thinking and writing something like our own, and, in spite of his whims and his delicacies, we are confident we should have agreed to a tittle. As for the rest, they would all have had their posts, some in the higher and some in the lower chambers of our temple of immortali

ty, as our old friend Jeremy very properly denominates it. Sylvanus should have superintended our obituaries. Horace Walpole might have arranged our nicknacks; and Voltaire, who would have been delighted at the idea of writing in our Magazine, might have officiated as our jack of all trades. Our readers will observe we say no thing of the author of Junius. We are above mysteries, but there is a delicacy in this case which restrains us. In fact, to tell the truth, we wrote the book ourself, when our politics and our principles were not properly fixed. We must, however, observe, as a kind of corollary to the preceding, that there is yet another instance in which our modesty has prevented us from coming openly forward, and receiving in our own person the acclamations and plaudits of the world. There is yet another instance in which our possession of Gyges's Ring has procured us the immunities of invisibility. This excusable instance-but no-we will not anticipate, or withdraw the veil-we will leave it to futurity to determine what is this third and greatest claim of Christopher North to pre-eminence in letters.

But we are, in the mean time, digressing entirely from the subject; a mode of writing, to use the phrase of that eminent auctioneer Mr Smirk, pleasant, but wrong." We began with Sylvanus, and we have ended with ourselves, a topic certainly inexhaustible. In short, good reader, what champaigne is to homely black strap, are we when compared with our worthy predecessor. Nevertheless, there are times and seasons when plain dishes are grateful to the palate, and, after the flash and glare of our pages, it may not be unamusing to look back at the sober and serious miscellany of Sylvanus, who, good man! takes care that his guests shall never injure their health by interdicted spiceries. We will, therefore, with thy permission, our gentle friend, just tumble over his coronation volume for the year 1761. And first of all, we must observe, that the poetry is sad stuff. It is all of that particular sort which neither gods nor men are said to permit. Tales, Acrostics, Verses to Miss A. Miss B. and all the Misses in the alphabet,-Odes to Narcissa, Næra, Cloe, and other names of classical notoriety,-Stanzas on the Four Seasons, VOL. X.

appearing as periodically as the seasons themselves,-Epigrams which look as dismal as epitaphs, and songs which seem elegies miscalled, are the ordinary stuff of which the venerable Sylvanus weaves his monthly chaplet of poetical flowers. It must certainly have been a most comfortable and solacing reflection to the young manufacturers of these useful articles, the ingenious youths of sixty years ago, who now, alas! having lost the fire of their younger days, write for the Edinburgh Review, and "My Grandmother," to think that such a good-natured repository was extant, which, like the poors box in a church, was continually open for the contributions of the well-disposed. But now, indeed, Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. Editors are grown hard hearted, and constant readers, as well as constant writers, plead in vain. We will not number the hosts of young men, "smit with the love of poetry and prate," whose hearts we have broken by our repeated refusals, sometimes, indeed, embittered with the shafts of our wit, yet really the number is quite alarming. We are not without our fears of awaking some night, like King Richard the Third, to see our victims pass in review before us, upbraiding us with our cruelty. We wish, too, we had not similar cruelties to the fair sex to charge ourselves with; yet such is the melancholy case. It is an ascertained fact, that two sempstresses died within the last month of a decline, into which our neglect of the Odes of the one and the Stanzas of the other had precipitated them. We are accused of being severe; but we assure our readers, that no sooner were we made acquainted with their melancholy situation, than we hobbled out as fast as our gouty limbs allowed us, to be the messenger of glad tidings to them, and offer them, if necessary for their recovery, the long-desired admission. We were, however, too late. "Mr North," said one of them, " your kind attention is unavailing; we are now going fast to the bourne, from which, to use the expression of Shakspeare, no traveller returns; yet, why should we deny it, it would be some consolation to us before we die, to see ourselves in Blackwood's Magazine. We should then have finished our concerns on this side of the grave." Our good readers will believe that we could not refuse