name, and from their limited number, each has felt as if individually responsible for the reputation of the navy. Besides, the haughty superiority with which they have at various times been treated by the enemy, had stung the feelings of the officers, and even touched the rough pride of the common sailor. They have spared no pains, therefore, to prepare for contest with so formidable a foe, and have fought with the united advantages of discipline and enthusiasm.

An equal excitement is now felt by the British. Galled by our successes, they begin to find that we are an enemy that calls for all their skill and circumspection. They have therefore resorted to a strictness of discipline, and to excessive precautions and preparations that had been neglected in their navy, and which no other modern foe has been able to compel. Thus circumstanced, every future contest must be bloody and precarious. The question of superiority, if such an idle question is still kept up, will in all probability be shifting with the result of different battles, as either side has superior advantages, or superior good fortune.

For our part, we conceive that the great purpose of our navy is accomplished. It was not to be expected that with so inconsiderable a force, we should make any impression on British power, or materially affect British commerce. We fought, not to take their ships and plunder their wealth, but to pluck some of their laurels wherewith to grace our own brows. In this we have succeeded; and thus the great mischief that our little navy was capable of doing to Great Britain, in showing that her maritime power was vulnerable, has been effected, and is irretrievable.

The British may now swarm on our coasts-they may infest our rivers and our bays-they may destroy our ships-they may burn our docks and our ports-they may annihilate every gallant tar that fights beneath our flag-they may wreak every vengeance on our marine that their overwhelming force enables hem to accomplish-and after all what have they effected? redeemed the pre-eminence of their flag? destroyed the naval power of this country?-no such thing. They must first obliterate from the tablets of our memories, that deep-traced recol

lection, that we have repeatedly met them with equal force and conquered. In that inspiring idea, which is beyond the reach of mortal hand, exists the germ of future navies, future power, and future conquest. What is our navy ?-a handful of frigates; let them be destroyed; our forests can produce hundreds such. Should our docks be laid in ruins, we can rebuild them-should our gallant band of tars be annihilated, thanks to the vigorous population of our country, we can furnish thousands and thousands of such-but so long as exists the moral certainty that we have within us the spirit, the abilities, and the means of attaining naval glory-so long the enemy, in wreaking their resentment on our present force, do but bite the stone which has been hurled at them-the hand that hurled it remains uninjured.

NOTICE

OF

MR. SCOTT'S EDITION OF DRYDEN.

I HAVE often reflected on the cruel injustice of recalling, from that oblivion to which time, and the tacit consent of mankind, had consigned them, those worthless productions of distinguished writers, whose poverty obliged them to prostitute their talents to the licentiousness of the times. Genius partakes largely of that inequality which we observe in all the powers of man; is sometimes weak, often capricious, and always at the Add to this, that the fairest mercy of outward circumstances.

creations of fancy, and the noblest structures of human reason, too often fall into temporary oblivion, while innumerable wretched productions become the objects of strenuous admiration, and procure for their authors not only the most gratifying applauses, but the most substantial benefits.

It is, therefore, hardly to be wondered at, that the weakness of human nature should sometimes yield to the hope of temporary fame and reward, or to the pressure of poverty, and pay homage to the false taste of the times; or that indigent men of

genius should sometimes be found offering incense at the shrine of immorality. I would plead in their excuse, that, like all other men, they erred because their temptations were strong; and if I could find in their other works traits of generous feeling, or precepts of exalted morality, I would treat them as we do a valued friend-cherish their nobler qualities, and consign their faults and indiscretions to oblivion.

But it is the fashion of the times to outrage the sacred ashes of genius, and rake in the graves of departed writers of illustrious fame, for those worthless productions, which, in the hour of youthful indiscretion, or the effervescence of licentious fancy, or in the anguish of repining want, they wrote to ward off the press sure of the hour. Every thing which, on the bed of death, or in the period of sober reflection, they would have wished to destroy, is sought after with avidity by the booksellers, who employ some patient drudge to pore over the repositories of forsaken learning, and ransack the grub-street records of the times, to find some polluted relic, made precious by the illustrious name of its author.

Such, indeed, is the deplorable rage for publishing new and complete editions, in England, that it is now no uncommon thing to see, in the same volume of an author's works, the most sublime moral precepts clothed in all the chaste and beautiful drapery with which the purest, richest fancy could invest them, polluted by the near neighbourhood of the grossest immorality, flaring in the gayest colouring of the most prostituted imagination. In this manner vice and virtue become, as it were, confounded together in the mind, while the same great name which gives authority to virtuous precepts, furnishes at the same time a sanction to vitious indulgence. By this ill-sorted association, too, the book becomes signally unfavourable to the propagation of morality, inasmuch as every good precept is furnished with its antidote close at hand; and every nobler emotion is checked and withered by the interference of its unworthy associate.

These reflections have been recalled more forcibly to my mind by having lately looked over the beautiful and expensive edition of Dryden's works, collected under the inspection of Mr. Walter Scott. This edition consists of eighteen large volumes, and being the most complete, will of course supersede every other,

The name of Dryden has been associated with my earliest admiration of genius, and his best productions are familiar to my recollection. But though aware that he had written much that deserved the censure of mankind, yet the majority of his readers were ignorant of those pieces of low and gross licentiousness, which his poverty, and not, I trust, his will, prompted him to give to the world. The present editor has, however, with the most barbarous industry, the most active and persevering research, contrived to collect, and rescue from friendly oblivion, à mass of licentious ribaldry that richly merited eternal forgetfulness. The great name of Dryden had gradually, as it arose above the horizon, emerged from those grosser vapours that surrounded and obscured its lustre, and was advancing to meridian splendour; his immoral works were on the eve of being forgotten, by being no longer before the public eye; and there was reason to hope that at no distant period, nothing would have been known of him but what deserved to be remembered forever.

But, in an evil hour, the avarice of the bookseller, and the prying industry of his well-paid editor, have again brought to light all that the rational admirers of this great poet could wish that he had never written; and all that a sacred regard to the illustrious dead should have induced them to bury in his grave. Again have they thrown a cruel sunshine on his transgressions, and entwined deadly nightshade with the evergreen that overshadowed his tomb.

I never contemplate the life and character of Dryden without being struck with the awful and tremendous dangers that surround the man of genius, when assailed by poverty. To know that by prostituting his pen to the vices of the times, by indulging his fancy in licentious images, or by giving his reason to the support of error, he can ward off the hard hand of want, and place himself in temporary affluence, is to be possessed of a secret, dangerous to any human being, however strong may be his moral and religious principles. Comparative poverty, that is, the middle state between want and superfluity, may be favourable to the morals of mankind; but abject penury is certainly

not the school of virtue. The hungry and the naked indeed practise the virtues of temperance and fortitude, because they have no choice; but there is little merit in the endurance of inevitable evils. Dryden was almost all his life poor, and the example of his great cotemporary Milton, furnishes an immortal specimen of the rewards which were bestowed on the most sublime exertions of the noblest genius that perhaps the world ever knew. It is not in the nature of man to starve when he has the means of obtaining subsistence in his power; and that Dryden, under such circumstances, should have accommodated himself to the debauched taste of his patrons, however it may be a subject of regret, can scarcely be a matter of surprise.

It ought also to be remembered that Dryden lived at court, and in the most licentious age that England ever saw. On the restoration of Charles, the people of that country being freed from the sour domination of the Puritans, and the stern unrelaxed government of the Protector, seemed to have indulged in a kind of Saturnalia. In their haste to throw off the restraints under which they had so long laboured, they seem for a while to have devested themselves of those salutary decencies which are absolutely necessary to disguise the naked deformity of vice; and in their detestation of the long prayers, sour faces, severe decorum, and scriptural phrases of the Puritans, they apparently forgot that unblushing licentiousness is even more pernicious than hypocrisy. He who only affects to be virtuous, so long as he remains undetected, affords at least an example of virtue; while the avowed libertine is deprived even of that slender palliation.

The English writers, who, like other men, are extremely apt to lay their faults upon their neighbours, have placed this relaxation of religion and morality to the account of the long residence of Charles and his courtiers on the continent, and particularly in France. That the vagabondizing life of this merry monarch, and his followers, may have contributed to render them loose in their principles, and careless of preserving the decorums of life, I am willing to allow; for all must have observed the salutary restraint which a regular, stationary life imposes upon mankind; and what little security you can have for the good