"To Mr. Newton's. To Mrs. Cobb's (g).

"Dr. Darwin's (h). I went again to Mrs. Aston's. She was very sorry to part.

9.

"Breakfasted at Mr. Garrick's (i). Visited Miss Vyse (k).

"Miss Seward (1).

"Went to Dr. Taylor's (m).

"I read a little on the road in Tully's Epistles and Martial. "Mart. 8th, 44, lino pro limo (n).

10.

"Morning, at church. Company at dinner.

11.

"At Ilam. At Oakover. I was less pleased with Ilam than when I saw it first, but my friends were much delighted (0).

12.

"At Chatsworth. The water willow. The cascade shot out from many spouts. The fountains. The water tree. The smooth floors in the

highest rooms. Atlas, fifteen hands inch and half (p).

"River running through the park. The porticoes on the sides support two galleries for the first floor.

"My friends were not struck with the house. It fell below my ideas of the furniture. The staircase is in the corner of the house. The hall in the corner, the grandest room, though only a room of passage.

"On the ground-floor, only the chapel and the breakfast-room, and a small library; the rest, servants' rooms and offices (9).

"A bad inn.

"At Matlock.

13.

14.

"At dinner at Oakover; too deaf to hear, or much converse (r). Mrs. Gell.

"The chapel at Oakover (s). The wood of the pews grossly painted. I could not read the epitaph. Would learn the old hands.

15.

"At Ashbourn. Mrs. Diot and her daughters came in the morning, Mrs. Diot dined with us. We visited Mr. Flint."

NOTES.

(a) "A village in Surry about six miles from London; the residence of Mr. Thrale. During the life of Mr. Thrale, his house was the resort of the most eminent and distinguished characters of his time. Here Johnson

was domesticated, and Garrick, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, were often found.

(b)" When at this place Mrs. Thrale gives an anecdote of Johnson, to shew his minute attention to things which might reasonably have been supposed out of the range of his observation. When I came down to breakfast at the inn, my dress did not please him, and he made me alter it entirely before he would stir a step with us about the town, saying most satirical things concerning the appearance I made in a riding-habit; and adding, "Tis very strange that such eyes as yours cannot discern propriety of dress: if I had a sight only half as good, I think I should see to the centre.'

"Johnson has contrived to introduce the city of Lichfield into his Dictionary of the English Language, from its having been the place of his birth. Lichfield, the field of the dead, a city in Staffordshire, so named from martyred Christians. Salve magna parens.'

(c) " Mrs. Lucy Porter. A step-daughter to Dr. Johnson. Her brother, a captain in the navy, had left her a fortune of ten thousand pounds; about a third of which she laid out in building a stately house, and making a handsome garden, in an elevated situation in Lichfield. Johnson, when he visited Lichfield alone, lived at her house. She reverenced him, and he had a parental tenderness for her. App. 1.

(d)" Mrs. Elizabeth Aston. A daughter of Sir Thomas Aston. She lived at Stow Hill, an eminence adjoining to Lichfield. App. 2.

(e)" Mr. Richard Green was an apothecary, and related to Dr. Johnson. He had a considerable collection of antiquities, natural curiosities, and ingenious works of art. He had all the articles accurately arranged, with their names upon labels, and on the staircase leading to it was a board, with the names of contributors marked in gold letters. A printed catalogue of the collection was to be had at a bookseller's.

(f) "Mr. Newton was a gentleman, long resident in Lichfield, who had acquired a large fortune in the East Indies."

(g)" Mrs. Cobb was a widow lady who lived at a place called the Friary, close to Lichfield. She was a great admirer of Johnson, though it would seem, if Miss Seward's statement be correct, he had but little admiration for her. Mrs. Cobb knows nothing, has read nothing; and where nothing is put into the brain, nothing can come out of it to any purpose of rational entertainment.' Miss Seward, however, observes, that although she was illiterate, her understanding was strong, her perceptions quick, her wit shrewd, comic, sarcastic, and original.

(h) " Dr. Erasmus Darwin; at this time he lived at Lichfield, where he had practised as a Physician from the year 1756, and did not settle at Derby till after his second marriage with Mrs. Pool, in the year 1781.

"Miss Seward says, that although Dr. Johnson visited Lichfield while Dr. Darwin lived there, they had only one or two interviews, and never afterwards sought each other. Mutual and strong dislike subsisted between them. Dr. Darwin died April 18, 1802, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. (i) "This gentleman was Mr. Peter Garrick, brother to David Garrick, and bore a striking resemblance to him. Johnson speaking of him to Boswell says: Sir, I don't know but if Peter had cultivated all the arts of gaiety as much as David has done, he might have been as brisk and lively. Depend upon it, sir, vivacity is much an art, and depends greatly on habit.'

(k) "A daughter of the Rev. Arch-Deacon Vyse, of the Diocese of Lichfield and Coventry.

1

()" Miss Seward was the daughter of the Rev. Thomas Seward, CanonResidentiary of the Cathedral of Lichfield. Six volumes of letters by this lady, published since her death, have put the public in full possession of the kind of intimacy or friendship which subsisted between her and Dr. Johnson.

(m) "Dr. Taylor of Ashbourne in Derbyshire. Dr. Johnson's old friend and school-fellow; of whom he said, He is better acquainted with my heart than any man or woman now living. App. 3.

(n) "The verse in Martial is

Defluat, et lento splendescat turbida limo.'

"The epigram is addressed to Flaccus, and in the common editions of Martial it has the number 45, and not 44."

(o)" Ilam is the celebrated residence of Mr. Porte at the entrance of Dovedale. Notwithstanding Johnson was less pleased with his second visit to Ilam than the first, yet he has in this Diary given very ample proof that he enjoyed its beauties.

"In July, 1777, Dr. Johnson took Boswell to see this place, which would seen to be the third time, at least, that he had been there; and this is the account Boswell gives of the visit. I recollect a very fine amphitheatre, surrounded with hills, covered with woods, and walks neatly formed along the side of a rocky steep, on the quarter next the house, with recesses under projections of rock, overshadowed with trees; in one of which recesses, we were told, Congreve wrote his 'Old Bachelor.' We viewed a remarkable natural curiosity at Ilam; two rivers bursting near each other from the rock, not from immediate springs, but after having run for many miles under ground. Plott, in his History of Staffordshire,' gives an account of this curiosity; but Johnson would not believe it, though we had the attestation of the gardener, who said, he had put in corks, where the river Manyfold sinks into the ground, and had catched them in a net, placed before one of the openings where the water bursts out.

(p) "This was a race-horse, which was very handsome and very gentle, and attracted so much of Dr. Johnson's attention, that he said; of all the Duke's possessions, I like Atlas best.'

(9) "This is the second time Johnson had visited Chatsworth. He saw it, Nov. 26, 1772; and in a letter to Mrs. Thrale he says, 'Chatsworth is a very fine house. I wish you had been with me to see it; for then as we are apt to want matter of talk, we should have gained something new to talk on. They complimented me with playing the fountain, and opening the cascade. But I am of my friend's opinion, that when one has seen the ocean, cascades are but little things.'

(r)" Dr. Johnson's hearing was very defective, and a cold made him too deaf to enjoy society. In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, Sept. 14, 1773, he says, "I have a cold and am miserably deaf:' and on the 21st he says, 'I am now too deaf to take the usual pleasure in conversation.'

(s)" This chapel is at Burleydam in Cheshire, close to Comberınere, built by Sir Lynch Salusbury Cotton, Mrs. Thrale's uncle.

After a great deal of matter, equally interesting and original, we come to the following passages; which, we can assure our readers, are the only portions of the book which any one will be able to read a second time.

"We saw Hawkestone, the seat of Sir Rowland Hill, and were conducted by Miss Hill over a large tract of rocks and woods; a region abounding

with striking scenes and terrific grandeur. We were always on the brink of a precipice, or at the foot of a lofty rock; but the steeps were seldom naked: in many places, oaks of uncommon magnitude shot up from the crannies of stone; and where there were no trees, there were underwoods and bushes.

"Round the rocks is a narrow path cut upon the stone, which is very frequently hewn into steps; but art has proceeded no further than to make the succession of wonders safely accessible. The whole circuit is some what laborious; it is terminated by a grotto cut in the rock to a great extent, with many windings, and supported by pillars, not hewn into regularity, but such as imitate the spots of nature, by asperities and protuberances.

"The place is without any dampness, and would afford an habitation not uncomfortable. There were from space to space seats cut out in the rock. Though it wants water, it excels Dovedale by the extent of its prospects, the awfulness of its shades, the horrors of its precipices, the verdure of its hollows, and the loftiness of its rocks: the ideas which it forces upon the mind are, the sublime, the dreadful, and the vast. Above is inaccessible altitude, below is horrible profundity. But it excels the garden of Ilam only in extent.

Ilam has grandeur, tempered with softness; the walker congratulates his own arrival at the place, and is grieved to think he must ever leave it. As he looks up to the rocks, his thoughts are elevated; as he turns his eyes on the vallies, he is composed and soothed.

"He that mounts the precipices at Hawkestone, wonders how he came thither, and doubts how he shall return. His walk is an adventure, and his departure an escape. He has not the tranquillity, but the horrors, of solitude; a kind of turbulent pleasure, between fright and admiration.

"Ilam is the fit abode of pastoral virtue, and might properly diffuse its shades over nymphs and swains. Hawkestone can have no fitter inhabitants than giants of mighty bone and bold emprise; men of lawless courage and heroic violence. Hawkestone should be described by Milton, and Ilam by Parnel."

The "Diary" then resumes its original nothingness, and tells us in the same style that Johnson enlarged his notions, and that he had cold meat for dinner; that he offered a prayer, and that he pulled a bulrush ten feet high; that he composed a Greek epigram, and visited Mr. Flint. Such is the stuff of which this "Diary" is made: and the "opinions and observations by Dr. Johnson," with which Mr. Duppa has, at least, increased the bulk of his book, if not its value, are trite and common-place, and wordy in the extreme.

We are at this time in a too querulous mood, and too full of disappointment, to venture upon any more animadversions upon the book; which is indeed so somniferous, as to have left us little power or inclination to do so we shall therefore conclude by expressing our indignant regret, that Mr. Duppa should have given to the thing the sanction of his respectable

name.

517

ART. XII. — A Guide to Mount's Bay, and Land's End. Pp. 156. 6s. [No Bookseller's name.]

ELEGANTLY written, neatly printed, and adorned with two beautiful views of a Cromlech, and of St. Michael's Mount, this little volume has been ushered into the world without either author's or publisher's name. That it is of more value, however, than folios of common-place provincial history, a few excerpts will readily evince.

"From the Lizard, (says our author,) the shores pass northward and westward, and gradually losing, as they proceed, their rocky features, swell into sloping sweeps of richly cultivated land, and into hills glowing with perpetual verdure; as the coast advances, and at the same time spreads itself southward, it unites to its luxuriant richness a bolder character, and rising like a vast amphitheatre, it opposes a barrier to Western storms, whilst it presents its undulating bosom to the sun, and collecting his rays, pours them, with multiplied effect, upon every part of the surrounding Country: the shores now pass again westward, and extend to the Land's End, where they become more rocky, and occasionally exhibit granitic piles of the most awful magnificence.

"The shores of the bay are sprinkled with picturesque villages, churches, cottages, and villas, and near its eastern margin, a pile of rocks, supporting a venerable chapel on their summit, start abruptly from the waves, and present an appearance of a most singular and beautiful description: this is Saint Michael's Mount, an eminence, equally celebrated in the works of the poet, the naturalist, the antiquary, and the historian.

:

"The country is inexhaustibly rich in the variety and beauty of its minerals, and will afford, as we shall hereafter find, an ample field for geological speculations at the same time, the antiquarian [read antiquary,] will be delighted with the examination of the rudest relicks of antiquity, which lie scattered on all sides: nothing is more pleasing than that sacred enthusiasm, which is diffused through the mind by the contemplation of the faded monuments of past ages, and surely no spot was ever more congenial to such sensations.

"During the last winter, (A. D. 1814,) when the cold was so dreadfully severe in every other part of great Britain, the thermometer in the Mount's Bay was never once under 29 of Fahrenheit, but little snow fell, and the frost was so transient, and gentle, that the huntsman was deprived of his sport but for a few days."

Whether the Mount's-Bay was formerly a woodland or not, has long been a disputed point. Our author does not doubt the fact of its having once been so. The sea, indeed, is rapidly encroaching upon every part of the Cornish peninsula. And it appears, from a regular survey made in the reign of Edward I., that Cornwall measured 1,500,000 acres: whereas, at present, it does not contain more than 758,484. As to the geological structure of St. Michael's Mount, the body of the rock is composed of clay, slate, and granite. Of its civil and ecclesiastical