DR. DARWIN.

Almost five years are elasped since Dr. Darwin left Lichfield. A handsome young widow, relict of Colonel Pool, by whom she had three children, drew from us, in the hymeneal chain, our celebrated physician, our poetic and witty friend.

The doctor was in love like a very Celadon, and a numerous young family are springing up in consequence of a union, which was certainly a little unaccountable; not that there was any wonder that a fine, graceful, and affluent, young woman, should fascinate a grave philosopher; but that a sage of no elegant external, and sunk into the vale of years, should, by so gay a lady, be preferred to younger, richer, and handsomer, suitors, was the marvel; especially since, though lively, benevolent, and by no means deficient in native wit, she was never suspected of a taste for science, or works of imagination. Yet so it was; and she makes her ponderous spouse a very attached, and indeed devoted, wife! The poetic philosopher, in return, tranfers the amusement of his leisure hours, from the study of botany and mechanics, and the composition of odes and heroic verses, to fabricating riddles and charards! Thus employed, his mind is somewhat in the same predicament with Hercules's body, when he sat amongst the women, and handled the distaff.

Dr. Darwin finds himself often summoned to Lichfield; indeed, whenever symptoms of danger arise in the diseases of those whose fortunes are at all competent to the expense of employing a distant physician. When I see him, he shall certainly be informed how kindly your ladyship inquires after his welfare, and that of his family. His eldest son by his first wife, who was one of the most enlightened and charming of women, died of a putrid fever, while he was studying physic at Edinburg, with the most sedulous attention, and the most promising ingenuity His second is an attorney at Derby, of very distinguished merit, both as to intellect and virtue ;-and your play-fellow, Robert, grown to an uncommon height, gay and blooming as a morn of summer, pursues medical studies in Scotland, under happier auspices, I hope, ' than his poor brother.

CHARACTER OF JOHNSON.

If Dr. Johnson's heart had been as comprehensively benevolent as his genius was comprehensive, the excess of unqualified praise, now poured upon his tomb, had been deserved. Unhappily for his own peace, as for the posthumous fame of our English classics, his adherence to truth was confined to trivial occurrences, and abstract morality, his generosity to giving alms, his sincerity to those he hated, and his devotion to the gloom of religious ter

ror. Truth, from Dr. Johnson's lip, yielded to misrepresentation in his rage of casting rival excellence into shade. That generosity, which loves to place exalted genius and virtue in their fairest point of view, was a stranger to Dr. Johnson's heart. His violent desire of life, while he was continually expatiating upon its infelicity, the unphilosophic and coward horror with which he shrunk from the approach of death, proved that his religion was not of that amiable species, which smooths the pillow of the dying man, and sheds upon it the light of religious hope.

If the misleading force of his eloquence had not blighted the just pretensions of others, both to moral and intellectual excellence, I should not regret to see Johnson's character invested with this ideal splendour; since I always thought it for the interest of morality and literature, to believe exalted genius good as great, and, in a considerable degree, exempt from human depravity; such belief having a natural tendency to inspirit the pursuit of excellence, and give force to the precept of the moralist. But since he has industriously laboured to expose the defects, and defame the virtues and talents, of his brethren in the race of literary glory, it is sacrificing the many to an individual, when, to exalt him, truth is thus involved, and hid in hyperbolic praise.

O England! not less ungrateful than partial, is this thy boundless incense. Investing the gloomy devotion, and merely pecuniary donations of Johnson with the splendour of faultless excellence, thou sacrificest an hetacomb of characters, most of them more amiable, and some of them yet greater in points of genius, to his manes!

BOSWELL.

Mr. Boswell has applied to me for Johnsonian records for his life of the despot. If he inserts them unmutilated, as I have arranged them, they will contribute to display Johnson's real character to the public; that strange compound of great talents, weak and absurd prejudices, strong, but unfruitful, devotion; intolerant fierceness; compassionate munificence, and corroding envy. I was fearful that Mr. Boswell's personal attachment would have scrupled to throw in those dark shades which truth commands should be employed in drawing the Johnsonian portrait; but these fears are considerably dissipated by the style of Mr. Boswell's acknowledgments for the materials I had sent him, and for the perfect impartiality with which I had spoken of Johnson's virtues and faults. He desires I would send him the minutes I made at the time of that, as he justly calls it, tremendous conversation at Dilly's, between you and him, on the subject of Miss Harry's commencing quaker. Boswell had so often spoken to me, with re

gret over the ferocious, reasonless, and unchristian, violence of his idol that night, it looks impartial beyond my hopes, that he requests me to arrange it. I had omitted to send it in the first collection, from my hopelessness that Mr. Boswell would insert it in his life of the Colossus. Time may have worn away those deep-indented lines of bigot fierceness from the memory of the biographer, and the hand of affection may not be firm enough to resolve upon engraving them.

O! yes, as you observe, dreadful were the horrors which attended poor Johnson's dying state. His religion was certainly not of that nature which sheds comfort on the death-bed pillow. I believe his faith was sincere, and therefore could not fail to reproach his heart, which had swelled with pride, envy, and hatred, through the whole course of his existence. But religious feeling, on which you lay so great a stress, was not the desideratum in Johnson's virtue. He was no cold moralist; it was obedience,' meekness, and universal benevolence, whose absence from his heart, driven away by the turbulent fierceness and jealousy of his unbridled passions, filled with so much horror the darkness of the grave. Those glowing aspirations in religion, which are termed enthusiasm, cannot be rationally considered as a test of its truth. Every religion has had its martyrs. I verily believe Johnson would have stood that trial for a system to whose precepts he yet disdained to bend his proud and stubborn heart. How different from his was the death-bed of that sweet excellence, whom he abused at Dilly's, by the name of the "odious wench!"

BOSWELL CONTINUED.

Mr. Boswell lately passed a few days in Lichfield. I did not £nd him quite so candid and ingenuous on the subject of Johnson, as I had hoped from the style of his letters. He affected to distinguish in the despot's favour, between envy and literary jealousy. I maintained, that it was a sophistic distinction without a real difference. Mr. Boswell urged the unlikelihood that he, who had established his own fame on other ground than that of poetry, should envy poetic reputation, especially where it was posthumous; and seemed to believe that his injustice to Milton, Prior, Gray, Collins, &c. proceeded from real want of taste for the higher orders of verse, his judgment being too rigidly severe to relish the enthusiasms of imagination.

Affection is apt to start from the impartiality of calling faults by their proper names. Mr. Boswell soon after, unawares, observed that Johnson had been galled by David Garrick's instant success, and long eclat, who had set sail with himself on the sea of public life; that he took an aversion to him on that account; that

it was a little cruel in the great man not once to name David Garrick in his preface to Shakespeare! and base, said I, as well as unkind. Garrick! who had restored that transcendent author to the taste of the public, after it had recreantly and long receded from him; especially as this restorer had been the companion of his youth. He was galled by Garrick's prosperity, rejoined Mr. Boswell. Ah! said I, you now, unawares, cede to my position. If the author of the Rambler could stoop to envy a player, for the hasty splendour of a reputation, which, compared to his own, however that might, for some time, be hid in the night of obscurity, must, in the end, prove as the meteor of an hour to the permanent light of the sun, it cannot be doubted, but his injustice to Milton, Gray, Collins, Prior, &c. proceeding from the same cause, produced that levelling system of criticism," which lifts the mean, and lays the mighty low." Mr. Boswell's comment upon this observation was, that dissenting shake of the head, to which folk are reduced, when they will not be convinced, yet find their stores of defence exhausted.

Mr. B. confessed his idea that Johnson was a Roman Catholic in his heart.—I have heard him, said he, uniformly defend the cruel executions of that dark bigot, Queen Mary.

HANNAH MORE,

Miss More's poems have spirit and genius, but contain an af fected and pedantic display of knowledge and erudition, especially the Bas bleu. In the Florio we find many brilliant passages; many just and striking observations, and some admirable portraits in satiric traits. Not Hayley himself has drawn a modern beau better. Florio is the rival of Filligree, in the Triumphs of Temper, with sufficient difference to avert the charge of plagiarism from the female author;-but the versification in Florio is, at times, strangely inharmonious, often alliterating with the hardest consonants, and sometimes disgraced by vulgarism: instances, "For face, no mortal cou'd resist her." And,

"He felt not Celia's powers of face."

These face-expressions put me in mind of an awkward pedantic youth, once resident, for a little time, at Lichfield. He was asked, how he liked Miss Honora Sneyd. "Almighty powers!" replied the oddity, "I could not have conceived that she had half the face she has!" Honora was finely rallied about this imputed plenitude of face. The oval elegance of its delicate and beauteous contour, made the exclamation trebly absurd. How could Miss More so apply a phrase, always expressive of effrontery? and how

could so learned a lady suffer the pleonasm of the following line to escape her pen?

"With truth to mingle fables feign'd."

The character of Celia is pretty, but in the satirical strokes lie all the genius of the work.

As for the Bas bleu.-You have heard me sigh after the attainment of other languages with hopeless yearning; yet I had rather be ignorant of them, as I am, if I thought their acquisition would induce me to clap my wings and crow in Greek, Latin, and French, through the course of a poem which ought to have been written in an unaffected and unmingled English. I am diverted with its eulogies on Garrick, Mason, and Johnson, who all three hated each other so heartily. Not very pleasantly, I trow, would the two former have sat in the presence of Old Cato, as this poem oddly terms the arrogant Johnson, surrounded by the worshipful and worshipping Blue Stocking.-Had the cynic lived to hear his Whig-title, Cato, I could fancy him saying to the fair author, "You had better have called me the first Whig, Madam, the father of the tribe, who got kicked out of Heaven for his republican principles." To the lady president herself, I fancy the cynic would not now, were he living, be the most welcome guest, since the publication of Mr. Boswell's Tour. Miss More puts him to bed to little David. Their mutual opiates are pretty powerful, else her quondam friend, Garrick, would not thank her for his companion;-but misery, matrimony, and mortality, make strange bed-fellows.

MOLLY ASTON.

It is very true, as you observe, Johnson appears much more amiable as a domestic man, in his letters to Mrs. Thrale, than in any other memorial which has been given us of his life and manners; but that was owing to the care with which Mrs. Piozzi weeded them of the prejudiced and malevolent passages on characters, perhaps much more essentially worthy than himself, were they to be tried by the rules of Christian charity. I do not think with you, that his ungrateful virulence against Mrs. Thrale, in marrying Piozzi, arose from his indignation against her on his deceased friend's account. Mr. Boswell told me Johnson wished and expected to have married her himself. You ask who the Molly Aston was, whom those letters mention with such passionate tenderness? Mr. Walmsley, my father's predecessor in this house, was, as you have heard, Johnson's Mecanas, and this lady, his wife's sister, a daughter of Sir Thomas Aston, a wit, a beauty, and a toast. Johnson was always fancying himself in love