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The foregoing remarks are made upon conversation ;—upon conversation as distinguishable from discussion, or story-telling, or tea-table chit-chat: but we think they apply equally to letterwriting. We are sorry, however, to apply them to the volumes before us, from which we are hardly prepared to bring one illustrative example. The letters are in general mere gossipping; I like Miss A,' and I dislike Miss B; this duchess is just arrived at Tunbridge,' and that lady has just left it; I have been very ill, and am better,' (for the lady is a valetudinarian,) and I heard that you have been very ill, but I hope you are better.' Sometimes, however, she is grave, and then nothing in the world can be conceived more dull, more common-place, more utterly unworthy of the press than her observations. And yet this is more tolerable than her gaiety, her laboured wit, and forced antitheses. In short, we have looked nearly through the first volume, and have not been able to discover any one reason that any one letter should have been published.

We quote the following passages very nearly at random. First, for idle and insipid gossipping.

We went from Salisbury to Stone Henge, which is indeed an astonishing thing; and every way one would account for it there arises an insuperable difficulty. We then went to Amesbury, where great improvements have been and are still making; the winding river is pretty, but the place is marshy and wet, and I think promises neither an improvement of health nor chearfulness. The front of the house looks very prettily on the outside; within there are but few rooms, only one good one, and that is regular, and is prettily furnished with Mr. Wootton's landscapes. From Amesbury we reached Marlborough early enough to walk in Lord Hertford's garden, with which Dr. Courayer was pleased as at seeing a sort of acquaintance, but it has nothing in its aspect to recommend it to strangers; there is a mount in it of a surprising height, not raised to satisfy the curi. ous eye merely with a prospect, but it has of old times been made as a military observatory.. Vol. III. pp. 59–60.

I am very sorry for the account you give of Miss Southwell, but I hope when the spring advances she will recover. Why did not Lady Sunderland come to Bath for her cholic? You are very good to say you should not want any temptation to come into Berkshire but what I and my little Sandleford could offer; I will flatter myself that Mr. Perceval will be so well as to set you at liberty this summer. You do not mention the little Pere, he does not write, and I want grievously to know how he does. Mr. Montagu and my sister join in respects to you.' Vol. III. pp. 78-9.

And so on, page after page. And yet, after all, this insipidity is rather a negative quality, of which examples cannot be given, rather an absence of something which you cannot bring forward, than the presence of something that you can.

Next for the philosophy of these letters. The following must be allowed to be very true, though we do not think it very lively.

In my solitary musings in the coach, I had sometimes cast an eye of envy on the humble cottage, which to the beholders, if not to the inhabitants, shews the sweet aspect of content. We are apt to think their wishes have as narrow limits as their possessions, and their tem pers are as uniform as their way of life; that tranquillity must reside in minds that have never been agitated by hope or fear, awakened by solicitous cares, or refined by delicacy; which last, is most perhaps, the enemy of human happiness. A delicate person, like a sickly traveller on an inconstant sea, suffers equally from too brisk or too languid a gale, must have fair weather, sunshine, prosperous winds, and favourable tides, to make the voyage pleasant; while insensibility bears every change with equanimity, unruffled in the most boisterous storm, unwearied in the deadest calm. Thus in the wanderings of imagination, had I run over all the advantages of rustic stupidity, but when your letter presented to me pleasures which can arise only from delicacy of taste and a well awakened sensibility; I changed my opinion, envied neither shepherd nor shepherdess, but giving due preference to the pleasures of reason and taste, I sat down by my fireside with more than calm content, with real delight and satisfaction. Vel. III. pp. 251-2.

The following is not true.

< When we consider what discoveries in philosophy have been made, how many arts have been improved, how easily by printing each improvement in science is communicated to all nations, and how safely conveyed through ages, we are tempted to think meanly of the ancients. One might imagine all Newton's light, and Bacon's sense, entering the mind of every attentive reader; that each age should stand on the eminence raised by the former, " till mountains, heaped on mountains, reached the skies;" but alas! we know by experience it is otherwise. Great improvements are made by the extraordinary portion of intellectual gifts in individuals, not the inheritance and succession of ages. From Archimedes to Sir Isaac Newton, what a chasm! The only great and perfect in art or science, are the self taught.' Vol. III. pp. 213-14.

Lastly, to give Mrs. M. every chance for pleasing, let us have, a specimen of her gaiety.

Of all fowl I love the goose best, who supplies us with her quill surely a goose is a goodly bird; if its hiss be insignificant, remember that from its side the engine is taken with which the laws are registered, and history recorded; though not a bird famous for courage, from this same ample wing are the heroes' exploits engraven on the pillar of everlasting Fame; though not an animal of sagacity, yet does it lend its assistance to the precepts of philosophy; if not beautiful, yet with its tender touch in the hands of some inspired lover is Lesbia's blush, Sacharissa's majesty, and Chloe's bloom, made lasting; and locks, which, "curled or uncurled, have turned to grey,"

by it continue in eternal beauty; and will you forsake this creature for a little pert fowl with a gaudy feather? Vol. III. pp. 14. 15.

Having considered what time has done to the works of man, let us see how it deals with the men themselves; the turbulent William Rufus lies here very quiet in a stone chest; in another place, of all the pride and ambition of Cardinal Beaufort there remains only a mitred monument; of the learned William of Wickham merely a brazen figure. The bones of Saxon kings, who fought bloody battles with each other for a less compass of land than a modern gamester will lose at a rubber at whist, lie quietly interred by each other, and their bones are contained in a chest not big enough to hold a fine lady's muffs and tippets. What an excellent arithmetician is death! He subtracts and divides till he sets all accounts even, and makes the sum total of the king and cobler equal.' Vol. III. p. 55.

We could have wished, however, that the lady had been content with being alternately dull and flippant, and had spared her profaneness. We have several very light scriptural allusions in our mind, and the following very shocking passage.

Dear Madam, I stand, in respect to my account with you, as the wicked do in regard to a future state; I almost equally dread being annihilated in your memory, or condemned by the sentence that you must pass on me, if I exist there.' Vol. IV. p. 181.

But enough. Except for this last fault, (which is not a literary one,) none of our censure lights upon the author of these letters. They are letters of which no one, receiving them from an acquaintance, would grudge the postage. But we cannot sufficiently wonder at the partiality of the publisher, in thinking the public so far interested in Mrs. M., as to receive with eagerness and applause the diary of her illnesses, and the history of every glass of Tunbridge-water that she drank.

Art. VI. The Letters of the British Spy, 12mo. pp. 214. Price 5s. 6d. Baltimore: London, reprinted. Sharpe and Hailes, 1812. THE management of the secret and the exposition of the

authorship of these letters, are rather clumsy. The commencement of their appearance in the Virginia Argus, was preceded and prepared by an idle story, gravely told, of the manuscripts', from which they are selected, having been found in the bedchamber of a boarding-house in a seaport town of Virginia.' This chamber had been occupied, some time before, by a person who was represented by the mistress of the house as a 'meek and harmless young man, who meddled very little with the affairs of others, and concerning whom no one appeared sufficiently interested to make any inquiry.' He had left his lodgings, and gone nobody knew whither; and mine hostess' having no means of re

storing to him his property, fairly considered it as lawful prize, and presented it to a person who liberally places a selection from it at the service of the editor of the newspaper. The writer assumes the character of a young Englishman of rank; which rank, together with his name, he represents himself as concealing, while he maintains a studied insignificance of manners and conversation, in order to be at perfect freedom in prosecuting his observations, and that the subjects of them might not be put on their guard against his inspection. He pretends to be addressing the letters to a distinguished senator of his native country, a Mr. S, who is easily identified by a reference made to the eloquence displayed by him on the charge of the Begums in the prosecution of Warren Hastings The most pointedly ludicrous association of ideas, is repeatedly produced by the emphatical rhapsodies addressed to this correspondent, on topics of religion, on lofty and refined points of morality, and on questions of geology,-addressed, as they all are, with the most serious assumption of their being subjects for the most sympathetic interest.

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A few expressions abusive of the American democracy, arc thrown in here and there, by way of preserving the consistency of the assumed character: very little art, however, is exerted on this object; and if a deception was ever seriously intended, he must have been a singularly bungling performer that could not guard himself against the repeated treachery of that notorious transatlantic word grade.' Towards the end, the ill-performed sham is very nearly dropped; and on the reprinting of the letters collectively in a volume, the American publisher, in an advertisement, avows his having ob ained corrections from the author; says something about the honour which the performance reflects, not only on the author, but on his country; and bears it off with a triumphant flourish and challenge in behalf of the literary claims and glories of America, where, (if he is not putting a joke on European simplicity) there exists a marvellous and preternatural faculty, which has been refused to every other part of the terrestrial creation, notwithstanding the complaisant ascription of it to every region.

To those who, (he remarks,) would inculcate the degrading doc. trine, that this is the country

"Where Genius sickens, and where Fancy dies,”

we could offer the letters of the British Spy, as an unquestionable evidence that America is entitled to a high rank in the republic of letters; and that the empyreal flame can be respired under any region.'

The publishers of the English edition, make proclamation before it in a somewhat less imperial style; yet they expect it to be received as a specimen of American literature, highly flattering to the rising genius of that nation;' and they are informed, by a gentleman from Baltimore, that no original American production had ever obtained so rapid and extensive a circulation, it having, in a very short space of time, passed through four editions.' The work may, therefore, claim a short notice here, less on its own account, than as affording an indication of the stage to which the reading part of the American population has advanced in the progress of literary taste.

The supposed Englishman happens to observe the quality of the strata of the Atlantic coast, as they lie exposed to view on the steep banks of some of the rivers, and he hears of the fossil remains of marine animals dug up in every part of the country, back quite to the Alleghany mountains, evincing that all this region was once under the ocean. These phenomena lead him into certain reasonings and fancies about the formation of the continent; some of which reasonings and fancies are encountered by a writer designated Inquirer;' and, as if a person who has indited sentences on paper, had, thenceforth, by some law of nature, a mysterious sympathy with the composition in all its fortunes, at whatever distance it may be, the Englishman, that had wandered away no one could guess how far, had, nevertheless, an instantaneons perception that his writing was assailed, and, by some mode of agency peculiar to authors, caused a public defence to be made forthwith.

The value of these indigested geological speculations, which form at least a third part of the production, appears to be extremely trifling. They display considerable vigour of conception; but the author has not a tenth part of the knowledge, either of facts or of the preceding doctrines and theories of philosophers, without which it is utterly ridiculous to set up for a builder of continents. It is ludicrous to see a self-important smatterer gravely referring, with a great length of quotation, to Brydone and his Canonico Recupero, and to the astronomical history of the Chinese, and to Voltaire's report of what the French philosophers found in that history, and to the saving of the credit of the Mosaic record by some better system of interpretation.

These fragments of philosophizing have a particularly impertinent appearance, as here thrust in among matters of a totally different order,-observations on eloquence, taste, style, national character, and the characters of distinguished American individuals. Three or four of these, indeed, occupy a very VOL. XI. 3 B

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