herein the intended satire falls on the feeble attempt to be satirical. Boileau said to his friend Racine, one day, "You say things that hurt me, not from the power with which they are uttered, but by an intention you shew to be satirical."

Metaphors.

It seems very incorrect, in so polished a writer as Mr. Pope, to have composed the following metaphor on no rational grounds :

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pieriau spring;
For shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
But drinking deeper sobers us again.

Art of Criticism.

This process is not true, if said of water, in the sense of intoxication; nor of wine, in any view. It seems, therefore, that the tralatitious meaning is grounded upon no foundation whatever. It may be supposed, by him who denounces waterdrinking poets, that the Pierian spring had some enlivening quality, unknown to other waters.

Poetry and Prose.

We often see in prose writers a very lively fancy displayed in a variety of poetical figures ; and in many productions of poetical, or rather

versifying, authors a total want of a proper quantity of metaphors and tropes to distinguish their compositions from those of prose. Lord Bacon, Dr. Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon (though an historian), deal in all the brilliant materials that make composition poetical, and exhibit the close alliance between rhetoric and poetry, and shew What thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Study of Nature.

Pope.

He who has no relish for a walk into the country in a fine day, has not cultivated the rich domains which imagination would bestow on him. He who flies to the fields from his study, either to avoid fatigue of business, or the probable visits of dull and irksome companions, on his first step from his home, feels a burden taken from his shoulders; his mind becomes elastic on a sudden; and he feels the truth of the Poet's lines

The meanest flow'ret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,

To him are opening Paradise.

Grammar.

Gray.

The early and late attention to the science of grammar can only find objections in the mind of How much of real knowledge

a blockhead.

depends on the use of words! The poet, and his cousin-german the rhetorican, have their peculiar phrases; and the philosopher uses more precise and pure phraseology. The sensible Dean of St. Patrick was aware of the uncertainty of language, and in his didactic pieces has used the most primitive terms to avoid, as much as he could, any phrases of a figurative or metaphorical nature.

Cupid.

Though this little gentleman is very frequently celebrated by modern poets and painters, yet are his qualities often mistaken by the first, and his figure misrepresented by the latter, artists. Modern poets describe the God of Love to be blind; and the painters actually put a bandage on his eyes. A blind and skilful archer is a strange phenomenon. The ground-work of these modern errors seems to be that the idiom of classical expression is in both instances misunderstood. In classical lore, especially the poetical part, the agent and the patient take place of one another, and the action of the former recoils upon him because love makes persons blind to the faults of others, the God of Love is called blind: this is well known to the readers of classical metaphors; but no one will find, in Spence's Polymetis, an account

of a blind or hood-winked Cupid: Mr Spence speaks of his sly and insidious looks, &c.

Ancient and Modern Dramas.

The personal introduction of gods and goddesses on the public stage by the most eminent writers, Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, &c. conveys a very disadvantageous idea of decorum in the religion of Greece. Since the refinement of modern manners, the English stage has quitted these profane and licentious mummeries. The old plays, called Mysteries and Moralities, were guilty of introducing the sacred characters of scripture in person. A most amusing history of this singular practice, and a learned detail and ingenious commentary on the "Sacred Dramas" are given by a late very excellent critic; in which the accurate antiquary and the man of taste, the fancy of the poet, and the piety of a christian writer, are amply displayed.-T. Warton's History of Ancient English Poetry.

Ancient and Modern Sepulchres.

Sculpture employed its most pleasing powers in the decoration of the ancient monument, or "sarcophagus;" and the imagery it exhibited was

grateful to the eye, and soothing to the feelings. Flowers, of the most beautiful colours and forms, spoke of the brevity of life's pleasures; and the butterfly, expanding its wings and seeking the upper regions, was a lively symbol of the soul's immortality. What shall we say of the coarse structure and design of our rural monuments,* but that they are equal to the poetry, which Gray says is written

To teach the rustic moralist to die;

but can convey to the eye of the more refined spectator nothing but the most disgusting images of the wrecks of the human frame.

Picturesque.

The poet Cowley's wish for a small house and a large garden seems in equal conformity to taste and good sense. When a house is too large for the premises, the picturesque effect is lost; the grounds about it appear scanty and mean. Lord Bacon, in his Essay on Gardening, says, with his usual soundness of judgment, "that buildings, in comparison with natural beauties, are gross handy works." To use an expression taken from musicians, "the house should play the second-fiddle,

* Sculls, bones, &c. tied together with a gay ribbon.