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has traced the footsteps of Gray, with the assiduity of Mr. Mathias, more may yet be detected.

'How do your tuneful echoes languish
Mute, but to the voice of anguish,
Where each old poetic mountain,
Inspiration breathed around,
Every rock and hallowed fountain

Murmured deep a solemn sound.'-Mason's Ed. P. 23. 'Poetic fields encompass me around,

And still I seem to tread on classic ground;
For here the Muse so oft her harp has strung,
That not a mountain rears its head unsung.
Renowned in verse each shady thicket grows,
And every stream in heavenly numbers flows.'

Addison's Letter from Italy.

A passage which strikingly shows how different an air the same ideas can assume when animated by the fire of Gray, and damped by the flatness of Addison.

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Leave me, leave me to repose.-Mason's Ed. p. 52. Quid, oro, me post Lethæa pocula, jam Stygiis paludibus innatantem, ad momentariæ vitæ reducitis officia? Desine jam, precor, desine, ac me in meam quietem permitte. Apuleii Mem. II. 40. The whole story, if compared with this ode, will exhibit a strong resemblance between the Thessalian and Norwegian incantations. See also Lucan. Phars. L. vi. 820..

-Sic, postquam fata peregit,

Stat vultu incestus tacito mortemque reposcit."

The following is an instance of very extraordinary coincidence in the ideas of two men of great genius, as the resemblance is probably accidental.

'Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.'—Ib. p. 66.

There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowells of the earth, many a faire pearle in the bosome of the sea, that never was seene, nor never shall bee.' Bishop Hall's Contemplations, L. vi. p. 872.

The following, referred to the same lines of Mr. Gray, has more decisive marks of imitation.

'How gay they smile! such blessings Nature pours,
O'erstocked mankind enjoy but half her stores;
In distant wilds by human eyes unseen,

She rears ber flowers, and spreads her velvet green ;

Pure gurgling rills the lonely desert trace,
And waste their sweetness on the desert race.

Dr. Young's Universal Passion.-Sat. 5.

A passage to which Mr. Gray had two distinct obligations within
the compass of three lines. It may be doubted whether Dr. John-
son would have quarrelled with Young for 'velvet green.'

'Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.'-Mason's Ed. p. 67.
• Even in our ashen cold is fire ywreken.'

Chauc. Reve's Tale. Ed. Tyrwhitt, L. 3180.

"(There they alike in trembling hope repose.')-Mason's Ed. p. 69. for which Mr. Gray refers to the 'paventosa speme' of Petrarch, of which his own words are a literal version; but he was probably not aware that Hooker, whose sublimities sometimes touch on the confines of very noble poetry, had defined' Hope' to be a ' trembling expectation of things far removed.'-Eccles. Pol. B. 1. Many more allusions or resemblances like these we could produce, but a few specimens may suffice to stimulate future investigation, and to prove that a learned editor of Gray might have been more profitably occupied in illustrating his best works than in the heavy task of correcting fifty sheets of uninteresting and tedious prose, which afford scarcely a subject for criticism. On this painful topic our opinion has now been sufficiently declared. It remains that we consider Mr. Mathias as an author.

The Postscript to the second volume, excepting a brief but inadequate apology for the insertion of so much new matter, is, in point of information, extremely valuable. From the recollections of Mr. Gray's surviving friend Mr. Nichols, the editor has gathered several amusing and instructive anecdotes. Gray, as is well known, preserved the dignity of genius to the full; he was in mixed companies reserved and fastidious, difficult in the choice of his friends, and though communicative and affectionate to the select few, yet even to them, with the exception perhaps of Dr. Hurd and Mr. Mason, he appears to have maintained a port sufficiently lofty. His opinions were delivered in terms short and decisive. On some persons and some subjects, his sagacity appears to have been next to oracular. The great object of his detestation was Voltaire: he said, almost prophetically, (considering the time when he said it,) that no one could even conjecture the extent of the public mischief (that was his term) which Voltaire would occasion. His aversion was constant and unmitigated. He once made it particular request to a friend of his, who was going to the Continent, that he would not pay a visit to Voltaire; and when his friend replied, 'What can a visit from a person like me, to him, signify? he rejoined, with peculiar earnestness, and with a decision ex

tremely like the tone of Johnson, Sir, every tribute to such a man signifies.' The predominant bias of his mind was a strong attachment to virtue, and hence, even if his papers had fallen into the hands of some mercenary and unprincipled editor, nothing could have been produced to blight his memory; no ribaldry, no scepticism, no profaneness. Happy would it have been for the noble companion of his travels, had he copied the fair example of his friend, or had the editors of his posthumous works recollected that the fairest fame may be blasted by copying the miserable trash of that school which Mr. Gray so much abhorred!

'Mr. Gray had a similar aversion to Mr. Hume, and for the same reasons: nor could he ever be reconciled to any deliberate enemy of religion, as he always asserted that such men, whether in writing or in libertine conversation, took away the hest consolation of man, without pretending to substitute any consideration of value in its place.'

'It has been expressed,' says the editor without due reflection, 'that he had a contempt or disdain of his inferiors in science.' Of this spirit, however, his letters afford abundant proof. From his earliest, almost to his latest residence at Cambridge, the University, its usages, its studies, its principal members, were the theme of his persevering raillery: neither could all the pride they felt in the presence of such an inmate, prevent, on every occasion, a spirit of retaliation. Among the elder and more dignified members of that body, out of the narrow circle (and very narrow that circle was) of his resident academical friends, he was not, if the truth must be spoken, regarded with great personal respect. The primness and precision of his deportment, the nice adjustment of every part of his dress when he came abroad,

Candentesque comæ et splendentis gratia vestis,

excited many a smile and produced many a witticism; nay, even a stanza in the Minstrel, as it stood in the first edition, has been supposed to have undergone a revision prompted by the tenderness of friendship, in consequence of the strong though undesigned resemblance which it struck out of the Cambridge bard.

Fret not thyself, thou man of modern song,

Nor violate the plaster of thine hair,
Nor to that dainty coat do aught of wrong,

Else, how mayst thou to Cæsar's hall repair,
For sure no damaged coat may enter there, &c.

In his later days, however, and when he seldom appeared in public, an homage was paid to the author of the Bard by the younger members of the university, which deserves to be commemorated. Whenever Mr. Gray appeared upon the walks, intelligence ran from college to college, and the tables in the different halls, if it hap

pened to be the hour of dinner, were thinned by the desertion of young men thronging to behold him. The comparative seclusion of the last part of his life accounts for the editor's assertion'nunquam se vidisse Virgilium,' though he was contemporary and resident with him in Cambridge more than twelve months.

Mr. Gray was a systematic as well as a severe student-he drew not from the fountain of literature only, but from the purest, the most copious, and the most remote.-His habits and his opinions were at the greatest possible distance from those of the being who, in the present general diffusion of knowledge, is styled a well-informed man.'

'Mr. Gray always considered that Encyclopædias and Universal Dictionaries, with which the world now abounds, afforded a very unfavourable symptom of the age in regard to literature.-Dictionaries like these, he thought, only served to supply a fund for the vanity or for the affectation of general knowledge, or for the demands of company and conversation.'

This was perfectly right-profound and original knowledge on any subject can scarcely be produced in society, unless it be selected for the purpose.

The subjects of his pursuits, as well as the authors from whom he sought them, were selected with that fastidious exactness, which marked every habit of his life.

'Mr. Gray was accustomed to say that he well knew from experience, how much might be done by a person who would have recourse to great original writers only; who would read in a method, and would never fling away his time on middling or inferior authors.'

In the present state of dissipated and superficial reading, the importance of this sentiment is daily increasing. Those who read only to talk of books, and are wont to estimate their own attainments or those of others by the number rather than the character of the volumes they have turned over, may learn from such examples, that it requires a process the very reverse of their own to attain to clearness or solidity of knowledge, to impregnate genius with the seeds of future excellence, and to brace the understanding by habits of rigorous and athletic exercise, through the united powers of which great original works can alone be produced, and great eminence be attained in the narrow compass of human life. Constituted as the literary world is at present, there is fortitude as well as dignity in remaining ignorant of the art and the subject of literary small-talk.

Mr. Gray's profound acquaintance with the higher Tuscan poets,' whose genius partakes so largely of the lofty character of the Grecian muse, has drawn' some excellent observations from the editor, whose influence we trust will not be unavailing in reviving

that noble school, to which, however neglected by the tame spirit of our poets and critics in the 'Augustan age of Addison,' Spenser, Milton, and Gray, have been so deeply indebted. On this subject no living writer is better qualified to speak with authority and decision than Mr. Mathias. Let every young aspirant to the character of a critic or a man of taste read and receive with respect the following admirable stricture.

'From disingenuous hints, from attempts to resolve the character, the merits of the language of Italy into opera airs, and from the perpetual ridicule with which the English Spectator so unworthily and indeed so ignorantly abounds on this subject, an effect has been produced which has hitherto been fatal to its credit and its cultivation in Great Britain. But it must be remembered that at that period the star of French literature was lord of the ascendant, and that all the bolder and more invigorating influences which had descended on Spenser and on Milton from the luminaries of Italy were now no more. We are now once more called upon, as in the name of an august triumvirate, by Spenser, by Milton, and by Gray, to turn from the unportical genius of France, and after we have paid our primal homage to the bards of Greece and of ancient Latiuin, we are invited to contemplate the lite rary and poetical dignity of modern Italy. If the influence of their persuasion and of their example should prevail, a strong and steady light may be relumined and diffused amongst us, a light which may once again conduct the powers of our rising poets from wild whirling words, from crude, rapid, and uncorrected productions, from an overweening presumption, and from the delusive conceit of a pre-established reputation, to the labour of thought, to patient and repeated revision of what they write, to a reverence for themselves and for an enlightened public, and to the fixed unbending principles of legitimate composition.'

With this golden sentence, which unites the glow and energy of Longinus, with the depth and precision of Aristotle, we dismiss the present article, earnestly commending so seasonable an admonition to the attention of those who fondly imagine that genius without taste, wildness without judgment, and invention without care and without caution, will ever produce a work, destined like those of Gray, of Spenser, and of Milton, to survive the cheap applause of modern and capricious fashion.

ART. IV. Elements of Agricultural Chymistry, in a Course of Lectures for the Board of Agriculture. By Sir Humphry Davy, LL.D. F.R.S.L. & E. V.P.R.I. &c. &c. Second edition, 8vo. London. 1814. pp. 500; with 10 plates.

MUCH

UCH has been said by the learned and the unlearned for and against the advantages of the theoretical cultivation of agriculture, as an object of national encouragement. The benefits of expe

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