DEAR SIR,

I AM extremely obliged to you for the trouble you have had the goodness to take, and which I am afraid you will be tempted to regret when you see that it is not yet at an end.

If you will have the goodness to send an order to Mr. King to make an Urn exactly resembling yours in all points, it would have more weight, and be likely to be better executed than if it came from me. I take the liberty to inclose two very plain inscriptions. I shall esteem it a favour if you will select one of them, and send to Mr. King after you have made any alterations. agree with you in thinking it cannot be too simple. Do you think Rt. Rd. or D.D. should have place in a memorial of this nature? Be so kind as put stops and capitals, charging King to adhere to them; and tell him (it was your own suggestion) to send me a copy in his own hand-writing to prevent mistakes. You will recommend expedition. When he sends the copy,

I

I am a little fearful about the coloured glass, unless I had a knowing friend on the spot to look at it,-a friend of mine having lately had some that was quite dark sent; but I believe I shall venture.

I should be much gratified to pay my respects to Mrs. Bowles, but fear I must postpone that pleasure. Should you and Mr. Nares visit the rocks of Clifton or of Chedder, you would in either case be within ten miles of us, and we should be happy to show you our Goblin-Coomb, which I think you did not see. Should you be induced to think of this, you would favour me with a few days' notice, as we expect about that time my oldest friend Lord Barham, and our slender accommodations oblige us to receive our friends in succession. We shall hope to see the ladies with you.

1 am, dear Sir, your very obliged. and faithful servant, H. MORE. Barley Wood, 14th August.

SIR,

Philadelphia, 1st Aug. 1797. I AM that identical William Cobbett (called Peter Porcupine) whose writings you have now and then honoured with your approbation. I take the liberty of enclosing you a file of my Gazette for the month past, which 1 shall repeat at the end of every month, begging of you to send me in return your useful and entertaining Magazine. This shall, however, be optional with you. I send you my paper, because, in your hands, I know it may become of use to my countrymen. Mark well all the passages respecting the Republican Britons amongst us. Depend on it they are sunk here below even the par of rascality and wretchedness.

Few booksellers in the United States carry on that branch of business with more life than I do. If you choose, and can fall upon any arrangement, I will receive from you a few volumes of your magazine half-yearly? 1 could get 50, if not 100 subscribers to the work, and this would take off a good

number of your surplus dead stock. This I must leave to yourself, Sir, but let me beg of you not to omit sending me your magazine half-yearly. I want also the two volumes for 1796. I will fall upon some method of getting you the money for these things. Let me have the honour of a letter from good "Old Sylvanus," and please to communicate to me the mode in which I can be most useful to your excellent publication.

America is become an interesting scene. Let me request you to pay particular attention to the humiliation we now experience on account of the weakness of our government, and to beg you to observe that that weakness grows out of the abominable system of universal suffrage. But, by reading the Gazette through you will choose for yourself.

I have the honour to be, Sir, your most humble and obedient servant, WM. COBBETT.

QUESTIONES VENUSINÆ.

No. VI.

Mr. URBAN, Charing, Aug. 14. THE conjectural reading in the first Ode of Horace, v. 29, TE doctarum hederæ præmia frontium | Diis miscent superis, as addressed to Mæcenas in his character of a man of elegant learning and the patron of literature, has been very generally received with great approbation. It is indeed a noble im. provement, and carries with it internal evidence abundantly of its truth.

Singularly enough, the first original proposer of that fine emendation remains yet unascertained. You herewith receive a brief statement of the different pretensions as far as they have come to my knowledge and in thus appealing to your learned readers, Mr. Urban, I may be able to elicit perhaps some unquestionable fact to determine the matter once for all.

1. Apparently, then, the celebrated Dr. HARE is one claimant: for in a

note to his Scripture Vindicated (1721, p. 263), when wishing to exemplify the value of conjectural criticism, he very cleverly shows, that the change from ME to TE is demanded by the context, and then concludes with these words.: I instance in this emendation the rather, because the ingenious author of the Freethinker tells us, that another person also of no name in Critick, a learned North Briton, hath had the fortune to hit upon the same.

Not long after this, John Jones, in his edition of Horace, 1736, adopts the emendation from Dr. Hare, and puts it thus in a very strong light: Si jam Diis mixtus esset superis Horatius, cur se Mecenatis suffragio cohonestari cuperet?

And D. Watson, in his Horace, 1741, V. i. p. 5, translates TE doctarum, &c. in this decisive manner, "Exalts you my patron and supporter to the Gods above;" and then, after referring to Dr. Hare for his authority in reading it so, he exposes the irrelevancy of ME to the reasoning and whole drift of the passage.

2. But Dr. Francis, on the other hand, who reads TE, and calls it a necessary correction, says distinctly, 'We are obliged for this correction to RUTGERSIUS." And our learned contemporary, Mr. Kidd, in his edition

of Horace, has these very words on the subject,

TE, quam suboluit RUTGERSIUS, protulit HARIUS, &c.

3. While Cuningham, the well-known antagonist of Bentley, as quoted in Dr. Combe's Variorum, refers the conjecture (which however he does not approve,) to a different source still:

His verbis, Me Diis miscent superis (sic enim legendum, non TE Diis, ut conjiciebat cl. BROUCKHUSIUS), indicat se in cœlo esse, hoc est, beatissimum esse;" &c.

Now, Mr. Urban, in the honest desire to give suum cuique, here is a cruel perplexity for you. Who shall relieve us from it? Some accurate scholar it must be, well acquainted with all the writings of Rutgersius and Brouckhusius, who can refer distinctly to any work of either of those learned men, in proof of his being the original author required of that most happy

emendation. I have not been idle

myself in the search; but hitherto without any success.

And then who

could the North Briton be? What

is the precise book, here meant by the general title, Freethinker? And in what particular volume and page is that North Briton so mentioned? Yours, &c.

MR. URBAN,

H. R.

TRUE to its original purpose of being the medium of communication between different correspondents, and especially on subjects that are caviare to the multitude, your Magazine for June and July last contains respectively a discussion on a passage of Horace where it may be fairly said of Bentley, that

"Versat saxum sudando neque proficit hilum."

It is not therefore without reason that your talented* correspondent J.M.

* I am well aware that J. M. like poor Charles Mathews of facetious memory, feels a qualm of sickness whenever he hears this horrible word, first introduced by the Cockney school; and that in the language of Aristophanes he cries out Irep, Taguv de! But how is a body to express himself in an age of Goths and Vandals, except by using the language of

objects to a reading which, though it is found in many MSS. and is backed by the stupendous learning of the great Richard, is nevertheless not what Horace wrote, because at variance with his peculiar characteristic of common sense. The passage, as commonly read in Ep. i. 16, is

"Idem si clamet furem, neget esse pudi

Contendat laqueo collum prensisse pater

Mordear opprobriis falsis, mutemque colores?

Falsus honor juvat, et mendax infamia

Quem, nisi mendosum et mendacem?

But here, instead of mendacem, Cruquius was the first to edit medicandum on the authority of his MSS. and the Vet. Schol. although John of Salisbury, quoted by Bentley, acknowledges the Vulgate, which J. M. too would not disturb, but alter rather mendosum into ventosum. Of this correction it seems, J. M. is so ventosus, i. e. according to his own interpretation, vain, as to assert that he has at length restored Horace to himself. Your friend H. R. may however fairly say of it,

Dedi id protervis in Criticum mare
Portare ventis,

by showing that ventosus has not, in Horace at least, the meaning J. M. assigns to it; and that the passage in Seneca, where ventosus and mendax are united, and which at first sight seems to put the proposed reading extra omnis dubitationis aleam, is not in point.

It must nevertheless be conceded, what J. M. has well observed, that the balance of the sentence requires the words falsus honor, and mendax infamia, to have some expressions better suited to them than mendosum et medicandum; because false honor delights not the faulty man, but the vain one; who, not possessing any honors either of birth or station, as was the case with Horace, the son of a freed man, would be desirous of obtaining some honours, no matter whether

men who have done their best to pollute the purity of English by every abomination emanating from the small beer minds of the march-of-intellect era.

GENT. MAG. VOL. IV.

genuine like gold, or false like pinchbeck; and in this point of view ventosus would be very appropriate if we were secure of the Latinity as being of the Augustan age. That mendosum is therefore mendose, I have not the least shadow of doubt. But the fault lies somewhat deeper than even J. M. suspects. For what is the meaning of the words mendax infamia terret-medicandum? Surely a man to be cured, is not to be frightened by the tongue of a Mrs. Scandal, although he might be at the knife of a Sir Astley Cooper. Read then, what Horace probably wrote,

Mordear opprobriis falsis, mutemque colores?

Falsus honor juvat, et mendax infamia

terret

Quem, nisi mendicum et mordacem?

i. e. whom but the beggar and the backbiter: for thus mendicum will approximate to the medicandum, and show that the words were once so transposed, mordacem et mendicum, that mordacem might belong to terret, and mendicum to juvat.

With regard to the general sense of the passage, they who remember that in the Saturnalia of the Romans the slaves were for a brief time masters, and doubtless pleased with their false honours, will understand the expression falsus honor juvat mendicum-while they who know that a scandal-monger or back-biter is disarmed at once by treating him as a mad-dog-and by calling out foenum habet in cornu, longe fuge, will understand mendax infamia terret mordacem: for thus the offending party would be destroyed by his own weapon of lying infamy.

Yours, &c.

ΤΙΣ.

AT a time when our elder poets are so much studied, and so justly admired, it seems not a little extraordinary that the Sonnets of the immortal Shakspeare should be almost utterly neglected. When alluded to, as they rarely are, by modern critics, it is generally to echo the flippant insolence of Steevens, who asserted that "nothing short of the strongest act of parliament could enlist readers into their service." We know, however, that in Shakspeare's lifetime, these sugred Sonnets," as Meres quaintly calls them, were in great esteem, and were for a long while far better known than many of the Plays, which fell into comparative disrepute for some time before the author's death, and were not published in a complete state until several years after. Only eleven of the Dramas were printed during the Poet's life. Shakspeare died (on his birth-day, April 23) in 1616, and the edition I have alluded to, was printed in 1623, and was the joint speculation of four booksellers; a circumstance from which Malone infers, that no single publisher was at that time willing to risk his money on an entire collection of the plays. A bookseller of the name of Jaggard did not hesitate to publish on his own account, in 1599, the sonnets which appear under the title of "The Passionate Pilgrim," even in defiance of the author, or at all events, without consulting his wishes. The collection was so inaccurate, and made with so little care, that "Marlow's Madrigal,' "Come live with me," &c. was included in it, as the production of Shakspeare. The unpopularity of Shakspeare's dramatic works during even the greater part of the 17th century, is another illustration to be added to a thousand others, of the capriciousness of the public taste. In one hundred years were published only four editions of his plays, and now, perhaps, next to the Bible, the exclusive copyright of these works would be more valuable than that of any other publication that has yet appeared.

When we reflect upon the manner in which the Plays have been subjected to the fickleness of the public mind, we ought, perhaps, to be less surprised at the fate of the Sonnets. There are also certain considerations connected with the latter, which may render their present unpopularity a mystery of more easy solution. In the first place, we must recollect the equivocal nature of their subject, and secondly, the unpopular character of the sonnet, as a peculiar form of verse. It is true, that at the time of their original publication, the sonnet was a fashionable species of composition, but it forced its way into notice rather from the great reputation of its cultivators, than from its actual adaptation to the general taste.

Another cause for their neglect may be discovered in the enmity of Steevens, whose arrogant and tasteless criticisms have had a strange influence over succeeding commentators. Alexander Chalmers observes, that "it is perhaps necessary that some notice should be taken of Shakspeare's poems, in an account of his life and writings, although they have never" (which is not true) "been favourites with the public;" but all he ventures to add, on so insignificant and unworthy a subject, is that the peremptory decision of Mr. Steevens, on the merits of those poems, severe as it is, only amounts to the general conclusion of modern critics! has also the audacity and folly to pretend, that it is necessary to offer some apology for inserting the poems of William Shakspeare in his voluminous collection of the British Poets. He ventures to assert that there are "scattered beauties" in the sonnets,

enough, it is hoped, to justify their admission" into the same collection in which Corbet, Turberville, Pitt, Yalden, Hughes, Duke, King, Sprat, Walsh, and Pomfret, have each an honourable place!!

In the lives of Shakspeare, in most of the Encyclopedias, a contemptuous silence is observed on the subject of the Sonnets; and indeed, the mass of