Mine was subject to all human infirmities, sin excepted: yours is subject to none, sin excepted."

Letter CLXXIX.

66

April, 1766. -Of politics there is neither end nor measure, nor sense, nor honesty; so I shall say nothing. I preached my Propagation Sermon and ten or a dozen bishops dined with my lord mayor, a plain and (for this year at least) a munificent man. Whether I made them wiser than ordinary at Bow, I can't tell. I certainly made them merrier than ordinary at the Mansion-house; where we were magnificently treated. The lord mayor told me, the common council were much obliged to me, for that this was the first time he ever heard them prayed for.' I said, 'I considered them as a body who much needed the prayers of the church.' -But, if he told me in what I abounded, I told him in what I thought he was defective that I was greatly disappointed to see no custard at table." He said, that they had been so ridiculed for their custard, that none had ventured to make its appearance for many years.' I told him, I supposed that religion and custard went out of fashion together.".

Among the various persons who incurred the dislike and provoked the animosity and wrath of bishop

Warburton, were the celebrated Dr. Leland and Dr. Jortin. These two very learned and worthy men, Dr. Hurd, in order to defend and gratify his patron, the bishop of Gloucester, attacked with extreme virulence in two publications, 1. An Address to the Rev. Dr. Jortin on the Delicacy of Friendship, first printed in 1755. 2. A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Thomas Leland, Fellow of Trinity-college, Dublin; in which the Bishop of Gloucester's Idea of the Nature and Character, as delivered in his Lordship's Doctrine of Grace, is vindicated, &c. first printed in 1764.* But after the bishop died, Dr. Hurd suppressed these pieces in the subsequent editions of his works. servile adulation that runs through the whole of Hurd's letters to War. burton will not appear surprising to any one who is acquainted with this anecdote. The zeal of Hurd was most acceptable to the bishop.

The

"I will not tell you," says he, (in a letter to him, dated Priorpark, 1764) "how much you have obliged me in this correction of Leland. You never wrote any thing in your life in which your critical acumen and elegant manner more shone."

Of Dr. Hurd's letters in this collection there is only one that does him credit: and it certainly does not a little credit to his critical sagacity, at a time when Dr. Blair, lord

lord Kaims, and all the Celtic part of Scotland, with many persons in England too, and more in France, maintained with a fond enthusiasm the authenticity of Ossian. Dr. Hurd is indeed well entitled to the praise of having been a good critic.

Letter CLIII. "Thurcaston, Dec. 25, 1761. "Your lordship has furnished me with a good part of my winter's entertainment, I mean by the books you recommended to me. I have read the political memoirs of Abbé St. Pierre. I am much taken with the old man: honest and sensible; full of his projects, and very fond of them; an immortal enemy to the glory of Louis XIVth, I suppose, in part, from the memory of his disgrace in the Academy, which no Frenchman could ever forget; in short, like our Burnet, of some importance to himself, and a great talker. These, I think, are the outlines of his character. I love him for his generous sentiments, which in a churchman of his com munion are the more commendable, and indeed make amends for the lay-bigotry of M. Crevier.

"I have by accident got a sight of this mighty Fingal. I believe I mentioned my suspicions of the Fragments: they are tenfold greater of this epic poem. To say nothing of the want of external evidence, or, which looks still worse, his shuffling over in such a manner the little evidence he pretends to give us, every page appears to me to afford internal evidence of forgery. His very citations of parallel passages bear against him. In poems of such rude antiquity, there might be some flashes of genius. But here

they are continual, and clothed in very classical expression. Besides, no images, no sentiments, but what are matched in other writers, or may be accounted for from usages still subsisting, or well known from the story of other nations. In short, nothing but what the enlightened editor can well explain himself. Above all, what are we to think of a long epic poem, disposed, in form, into six books, with a be ginning, middle, and end, and enlivened, in the classic taste, with episodes. Still this is nothing. What are we to think of a work of this length, preserved and handed down to us entire, by oral tradition, for 1400 years, without a chasm, or so much as a various reading, I should rather say, speak. ing? Put all this together, and if Fingal be not a forgery, convict: all I have to say is, that the sophists have a fine time of it. They may write, and lie on, with perfect security. And yet has this prodigy of North Britain set the world a-gape. Mr. Gray believes in it; and without doubt this Scotsman may persuade us, by the same arts, that Fingal is an original poem, as another employed to prove that Milton was a plagiary. But let James Macpherson beware the consequence. Truth will out, they say, and then

"Qui Bavium non odit, amet tua carmina, Mævi,'

The absolute authenticity of Ossian appears now to be generally, nay almost universally, given up. But not a little admiration is still due to the dexterity or art, and the vigorous imagination, of the SCHOOL MASTER OF BADENOCH.

A Historical Survey of the Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, with a View to explain the Causes of the Disasters of the late and present Wars. By Gould Francis Leckie, Esq. Pp. 272, 8vo. Close print.

WHAT has been so often ob

tors and statesmen of the present times are by no means so learned as those that flourished from the reign of queen Elizabeth to that of queen Anne, both inclusive, is not the less important that the observa tion is common. In those times public speakers, and actors in the political drama, were profoundly read in the history of nations, an tient and modern, and formed their plans in new cases, from those that bore the greatest affinity to them in preceding times. They drew their maxims from the stores of literature and philosophy; and, in short, they treated, much more than we do, notwithstanding the natural progress of refinement, politics as a science. Our public speakers, it is evident, if they be really learned men, and have drawn much from the stores of history, and moral science, hide their talents in a napkin, and affect nothing so much as wit, brilliancy, and even length of declamation. As to our men in public offices, or statesmen, the progress of official consequence and power is described by Mr. Leckie with a melancholy and alarming fidelity.

"A young man, of a powerful family, comes from the university into parliament; he had made a very fine oration in the theatre be fore the vice-chancellor and many

of the nobility; he had received an honorary premium for his performance. Under these auspices he gets up in the house of commons, where the elegance of his language and the roundness of his periods gain him universal applause. He is considered as a young man of promising abilities, and is destined to

He thus serves his apprenticeship under the minister of the day, and is thereby initiated into the routine of public business. From that moment his time is not his own, a multiplicity of papers are put into his hands, and the page of history is thenceforward closed to his inspection. His future political career is traced on the model of that of his predecessor; and as his habits of thinking are formed upon example, he becomes a minister without having once thought for himself on the most important subjects.

"An inferior class sometimes rises into notice, from a long employment in the public offices; and as their education has consisted either in copying papers, or wording official letters and dispatches, according to formule placed before them, these are also men of routine.

"From these two classes have been drawn the principal men who have guided the helm of the state of late years: but while they have the means of acquiring a perfect knowledge of its interior concerns, and may often do so in a very eminent degree, they are still totally incapacitated from obtaining even the rudiments of information on the foreign relations of the government. It is very easy to see that

such

such men, in arriving at their dignities, must necessarily have acquired all the prejudices of their predecessors, engrafted on the habits of office, which have deprived them of the time necessary to deep. reflexion; they cannot, therefore, be very open to the representations of those whose lives have been spent in travel, and in actual observation, who have attentively perused the history of past times, who have compared them with the present, who have caught the habits and entered into the spirit and principle of foreign governments, and who have thus learnt to appreciate the probabilities of events; who, in the prosecution of their local inquiries, have visited the palaces of princes and the cottage of the peasant."

In politics, as in law, plures sunt casus quam leges.-A revolution, a catastrophe, has happened in Europe to which the usual system of balancing power among different states is wholly inapplicable. The floods are out, and overflow the land. The landmarks disappear. We must pursue a new course, steering not in the trammels of precedent and mere official routine, but by the compass of reason enlightened by history.

The reasoning of Mr. Leckie, founded on a very comprehensive view of both history and the present state of the world, merits the most serious attention, and will, we doubt not, obtain it.-His doctrine is not of a melancholy or despairing kind. It appears to be the only system by which we may maintain, together with our commercial prosperity, our national independence.

The nature and design of this

very interesting work is briefly set forth by the author in an introduction.

"The events of the war which we are now waging, have already proved that all attempts to preserve the balance of power on the continent must in the end be nugatory. Two great powers now divide nearly the whole of it, and whatever assistance we give to either of them, may probably tend to no permanent good; so that the safest policy seems to be to look to ourselves for that security which we have hitherto founded on a precarious balance, and which has cost us so much treasure to maintain. This doctrine is now pretty nearly established, and the present alliance with Russia will perhaps be the last essay on the folly of coalitions !— Whether we pay subsidies to the Russians to attack France, or vice versa, the result must be equally useless; if either of them be too powerful for the other, it is not our money, nor the handful of men which we can furnish to either party, that will determine the contest. Should one of them over-run the whole, a state so formed must fall to pieces in a few years, and the favourite balance of power will be alternately erected and overthrown. But the empire of the sea will always balance that of the land, whether it be in one or more hands. And the example of the republic of Rhodes, which made so long a resistance to Rome, at a time when navies were not what they are at the present day, ought to teach us that our views should be confined to islands, or transmarine possessions.

"The following tracts have been written as the successivetransactions

sug

suggested the matter, result from the writer's having been an attentive spectator of them during the whole war, from its commencement after the death of Louis XVIth to the present time. Events have crowded so fast on each other, that their cause and spirit cannot at first sight be easily discovered; but this is evident to all, that the French have been successful in almost all their attempts, that they have totally changed the face of Europe, while the British government seems never to have been guided in its conduct by any general abstract principle, nor by any great and philosophic view of human events; but rather to have suffered its measures to be determined by some bias it received at the moment.

"Had the ministers of the crown attentively read the history of those .countries where their arms have been engaged, or to which their views have been turned, they could never have sent expeditions abroad, called forth by the reliance upon false hypotheses, and in no way adapted either to the circumstances of the country which was the object of them, nor tending to any one advantage, in the event of success. "Thus the conduct of our armies being cramped by considerations quite foreign to the real state of affairs, can produce no advantage, while the principle on which we carry on the war in general defeats its own object; and the diplomatic agents we employ abroad are either so confined by

the orders transmitted to them, the nature of their powers, or, as more frequently happens, by their own want of abilities, that wherever we find the British government concerned, we see the want of energy and decision, and inconsistency and weakness in all our measures. This opinion is now so deeply rooted in the minds of foreigners, that no party have any confidence in us, and our national credit is daily suffering depreciation. While the French were consolidating a great empire in Europe, we have been afraid to pursue the war with vigour, lest our success should excite the jealousy of our allies; and this sentiment, the offspring of timidity, has lowered us in the esteem of other nations, and become the subject of severe sarcasm, or contemptuous ridicule.

"The tracts contained in this volume may serve to elucidate the foregoing assertions, and at the same time satisfy us, that we have not only the means of commanding the respect, but also of gaining the confidence, of other nations; that the present war, were it conducted with a different spirit and more enlarged views, would produce not only the security which we declare to be its object, but also lay the foundation of a grandeur and duration far exceeding that of any empire which ever yet existed. To the attainment of that end, the present system, or that followed during the administration of the immortal Pitt,* cannot be subservient.