The grammatical fault would not have been committed, if the word corps had been written, as it should be, with a final e. In his Poem to the King he hath several times used the word corps in the plural. On the contrary he has added s to the word seraphim. The bathos was never so well illustrated by Swift, as it might have been if he had taken his examples of it from Addison alone. What think you of this?

"Thus Etna, when in fierce eruption broke,

Fills heaven with ashes.. and the earth with smoke."

Look now at his Saint Cecilia. The imbecility of the first line we will pass over: in the second, where is the difference between the voice and the

accents?

"Cecilia's name does all our numbers grace,

From every voice the tuneful accents fly." What does the word it relate to, in the next? certainly not to the accents, probably not to voice, for the every stands in the way.

"In soaring trebles now it rises high,

And now it sinks and dwells upon the base." Doctor, I am a dealer in words, a word-fancier; excuse me then if I premise to you, in the spirit of trades and callings, the importance I attach to mine.

the first and last deserving the name of poems, great as was the vigour and high the spirit of Ennius. Judging by the language, one would imagine that several centuries had intervened between them; yet the same reader might have been living the day when each was edited. The most beautiful flowers grow in clusters. Lucretius, Catullus, and Calvus, the loss of whose works is the greatest that latinity has sustained: then Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Cassius of Parma, the next great loss: for desirous as every man must be to recover the rest of Cicero and Livius, yet he perceives that there is enough of them before him to judge of their genius quite correctly: the remainder would afford him only the same pleasure as what he enjoys. In the lost poets the sources of it are cut off altogether: they can afford us no delight, and we can render them no justice.

Johnson. Addison has exhausted your stock. Tooke. I had forgotten him again. Since however you bring him back to me, I will endeavour to prove that he has exhausted neither my justice nor my patience. His spelling is villanous: coffyhouse, bin (for been), erry, instanc'd, inclin'd. He is fond of the word hint, which, as a substantive, no poet has used, or ever will use.

"Music can noble hints impart."

Johnson. Let us hear what you have to say.
Wisdom is founded on words; on the right appli- What is merely a hint, can hardly be noble.

cation of them.

Tooke. We have two which we use indifferently; on and upon. It appears to me that those who study elegance, by which I always mean precision and correctness, may give a specimen here. I would say upon a tower: on the same principle I would say on a marsh. There would indeed be no harm in saying on a tower; but there would be an impropriety in saying upon a marsh; for up, whether we are attentive or inattentive, whether we have been a thousand times wrong or never, means somewhat high, somewhat to which we ascend. I should speak correctly if I said, "Doctor Johnson flew on me," incorrectly, if I said "he fell upon me." Custom is a rule for everything but contradiction. We have hardly three writers of authority.

Johnson. How! sir! hardly three! People of your cast in politics are fond of vilifying our country. Is this your whigship?

For

"The Almighty listens to a tuneful tongue,

And seems well pleased and courted with a song." If these lines had been translated from Voltaire, you would have cried out against his impiety. I know not your opinion of Chaucer. Johnson. I do not read what I should read with difficulty.

Tooke. Addison says of him,

"In vain he jests in his unpolished strain,
And tries to make his readers laugh in vain."

The verses are a tautology, and the remark an
untruth. In his observations on Cowley there is
a bold conceit, which I think must have been
supplied by a better poet.

"He more had pleased us had he pleased us less." This, if it is nonsense, is more like the nonsense of Dryden than of Addison, and is such as conveys an idea. Here comes hint again.

"What muse but thine can equal hints inspire."

word than but.

"And plays in more unbounded verse, &c." Unbounded has in itself the force of a superlative, and cannot admit the comparative more. On Milton he expresses your sentiments, but not as you would have expressed them.

Tooke. Whigship it is indeed: but not mine. To make it English, we must read some other Consider me as holding out a cake of meal and honey to appease you, when I bring to your recollection that the Romans have but one. however great is the genius of Sallustius and Livius and Tacitus, faults have been detected in their style by those who could judge better of it than we can. Almost every elegant verse, almost every harmonious sentence in poetry and prose among the Romans, was written within half a century. The comic Authors were imitators of the Greeks nothing national is to be found in Plautus himself, in whose pieces every sentence bears the impression of its Attic mint. The great work of Lucretius and the greater of Ovid were

"O had the poet ne'er profaned his pen To varnish o'er the guilt of faithless men, His other works might have deserved applause, But now the language can't support the cause." Johnson. I confess that here he has reversed the matter, and that his own cause can not sup | port his language.

or a woman; they are turned into persons and individuals. Nothing is given or granted; everything is accorded. Weapons are out of use; but a pistol or a sword is become an arm.

Tooke. What has the cause to do with the other | work, and that the polish is given by attrition. works? He might forsooth have succeeded in There is no such a thing in existence as a man scenes of grandeur, if he never had written in defence of the commonwealth. It is indeed time that Addison should “bridle in his struggling muse." Johnson. Sir, let us call the ostler and put her into the stable for the night. She has a good many blemishes, and winces more than one would have suspected from her sleek and fleshy

Johnson. Very true. And soldiers are not encamped; they are biv.. biv. Do pronounce the word; you have flexible organs, and can proappearance. nounce the hardest in Gulliver's Travels. As for Tooke. She gives some indication too of having spelling it, I set the two Universities at defiance. been among the vetches.

Tooke. I hear, Doctor, what anyone may easily

Johnson. To be grave on it, metaphor is in- suppose, that your acquaintance is greatly sought applicable to personification.

Tooke. Hurd is among the most conceited writers of the present day. He has imitated in prose the metaphor so justly ridiculed in these verses of Addison. In his Dialogue on Sincerity, he represents Waller saying, "After a few wanton eircles, as it were to breathe and exercise my muse, I drew her in from these amusements to a stricter manage."

among the ladies. Now, for their benefit, and for the gentlemen too who write novels and romances, I would request you to exert your authority in repressing the term our hero. These worthy people seem utterly unaware that the expression turns their narrative into ridicule. Even on light and ludicrous subjects, it destroys that illusion which the mind creates to itself in fiction; and I have often wished it away when I have found it in Fielding's Tom Jones, although used jocularly. While we are interested in a story we wish to see nothing of the author or of ourselves.

Johnson. I detest, let me tell you, your difficulties and exceptions, your frivolity and fastidiousness; I have employed the word myself. You admit one great writer in one language! three or four in another! pray how many do you allow to Greece?

Tooke. I would not interrupt you, Doctor; thinking it of all things the most indecorous. England has many great writers, Rome has many: but languages do not retain their purity in the hands even of these. Whenever I think of Greece,

Johnson. His criticisms on others are usually sound and sensible. In his manners he is courtly; but in his language he mistakes vulgarity for ease, and inaccuracy for freedom. I remember an instance of his employing that word manage ambiguously. Instead of leaving it French he must give it an English spelling. With an English spelling it ought to have an English meaning, which it has not, but quite the contrary. His words are, "To the Hollanders indeed she could talk big; and it was not her humour to manage those over whom she had gained an ascendant." Now surely this expresses the very reverse of what the learned prelate wished to say. "Look big" recurs just below: and soon after "much indevoted to the court," and "misconceived of,” and a great means of the hierar-I think with astonishment and awe; for the chical greatness." Means is plural. "To both your satisfactions:" for "to the satisfaction of you both." Since you have mentioned Dryden, let me remark to you that his spelling is negligent. He writes look'd, traduc'd, describ'd, supply'd, assur'd, polish'd, civiliz'd. In his preface to the translation of the Pastorals, we find "Is there anything more sparkish and better humour'd than Venus her addressing her son, &c." And he spells icicles "ycicles."

"Are these the limbs for ycicles to tear." Tooke. He is rather to be followed in his cou'd and wou'd and show'd; because so it is, and so it was then, pronounced. Addison too has written the same words in the same manner. I wish he had sanctioned by his authority more of our usages, and older and better. But our vicious spelling, and everything else that is vicious in language, is likely to deepen; for every fresh shoal of novelists raises up some muddiness and wriggles against some weed. Of all the absurdities that ever were compressed into one word, surely the greatest is in the word chiselled when applied to features. If they who employ it mean to signify a fineness and delicacy, let them be taught that the chisel does only the rougher

language and the nation seem indestructible. Long before Homer, and from Homer to Epictetus, there must have been an uninterrupted series of admirable authors, although we have lost the earliest of them, both before the poet and after. For no language can hold its breath one whole century: it becomes, if not extinct, very defective and corrupted, if no great writer fosters it and gives it exercise in that period. What a variety of beauty, what a prodigality and exuberance of it in the Greek! Even in its last age it exists in all its freshness. The letter which the mother of Saint Chrysostom addressed to that enthusiast in his youth, is far more eloquent, far more powerful in thought and sentiment, than anything in Xenophon or Plato. That it is genuine cannot be doubted; for it abounds in tenderness, which saints never do, and is concise, which Chrysostom is not.

Johnson. Greece ought to be preserved and guarded by the rulers of the world, as a cabinet of gems, open and belonging to them all. Whatever is the fate of other countries, whatever changes may be introduced, whatever laws imposed, whatever tributes exacted, she should preserve her lineaments uneffaced.

Her ancient institutions

and magistracies should be sanctioned to her, in | into the House of Commons. Nothing is fitted to gratitude for the inestimable blessings she has conferred on us. There is no more danger that republicanism would be contagious from it, than from a medal of Cimon or Epaminondas. To Greece is owing the conversation we hold together; to Greece is owing the very city in which we hold it; its wealth, its power, its equity; its liberality. These are among her earlier benefits: her later are not less. We owe to her the better part of that liturgy by which the divine wrath (let us hope) may be averted from the offences of our prosperity.

CAVALIERE PUNTOMICHINO AND MR. DENIS EUSEBIUS TALCRANAGH. THE Cavaliere Puntomichino was the last re-ing our best authors, and wondering (as he inpresentative of an ancient family. He was an formed me) at one thing only, which is, that honest and rich man; so that, when his intention there could really be in the whole human race so was understood at Florence of travelling to Eng- prodigious a diversity, as he found in almost every land, it excited suspicion in some, and surprise in five men he conversed with in our metropolis. all; for Italians of that description were seldom "I have often observed," said he, "more variety known to have crossed the Channel. He went in a single household than I believe to exist in however, and remained there several years, read-all Italy."

He never had about him the slightest taint of there was seated at the window a young gentleman affectation; yet became he singular, and glaringly of easy manners and fashionable appearance, Mr. so, at his first introduction to the academy of La Denis Eusebius Taleranagh, of Castle-Talcranagh Crusca. For he asserted three paradoxes: first, that and of Skurrymore-Park, county Down, and first no sentence or speech in a comedy should exceed cousin, as he informed me, of Lord Cowslipmead, a fair sheet in octavo; secondly, that no witticism of Dove's-nest-Hall, county Meath, a great fireshould be followed by an explanation, in the dia- eater. I bowed on which he fancied that I had logue, of more than two pages; and thirdly, that known his lordship intimately. On my confessing Shakspeare had nearly or quite as much genius the contrary, he appeared surprised. "You as Goldoni. Henceforward he was a worthy man, must however have heard something," continued but an oddity. His claim to the literary charac- he, "in your earlier days, of Sir Roderic James ter I shall forbear to discuss; although I have O'Rowran, my uncle, who, whenever he entered many papers, not indeed of his own writing, but an inn with his friends, placed himself at the addressed to him by others, some of which go so head of the table, and cried, Whiskey and far as to call him a nightingale, some a great pistols for eight!' doctor, some an eagle, some a phoenix, some a sun, It was now my turn to be mortified, and I could and one both a sun and a phoenix. But this last only reply that there were many men of merit was written by a rival of him who wrote the pre- whom it had never been my fortune to know. ceding; and therefore its accuracy may be sus-" Then, sir," said he, "ten guineas to one you pected, and it was declared by the academy, never were in Ireland in your life; for you must after three sittings, to be more ingenious than have known him if you had met him, whether you would or not."

correct.

There was an infinity of good humour in Mr. Taleranagh; and if his ideas were not always perspicuous, they often came forth with somewhat of prismatic brilliancy. He acknowledged a predilection for the writers of his own country, "which," he said, "we authors are not apt to do." I then discovered that I had been conversing with a literary man, who had published an imperial folio of eleven pages on the Irish Wolf-dog.

"I sold my copies," said he, "and bought a tilbury and a leash of setters. And now, sir, if ever you should print anything, take my advice: cuts in wood or cuts in stone, and a black-letter

ledge of printer or publisher... to be sure, I was master of my subject, which goes a great way; and then indeed I had a pair of extraordinary capital buckskins, which, it is true, began to carry on the surface, as Southey says of Flemish scenery,

His sedentary life had been unfriendly to his health, and he was seized in the beginning of this winter with repeated and severe attacks in the breast. As he had inherited a good property, and had collected many rare books, all the canonics and professors began to write tributes, monodies, elegies, musa plangentes, Etruriæ luctus, and consolations to his heir, no very distant relative, whose brother in the time of the French government had been hanged for a robbery at the age of eighteen. He himself was in the galleys at Pisa for the murder of his father-in-law, who had educated him and had promised to leave him his estate. On the death of the Cavaliere, it was fore-title-page, for your life! I did it, without a knowseen that he, too late indeed for his happiness and sensibility, would be found innocent of an offence, for which the French laws in their precipitancy had condemned him. The proofs of this innocence were produced, the patron found, the sum stipulated, when the Cavaliere died. On opening the will, it appeared that he had destined his property to the maintenance of soldiers' widows, and the redemption of slaves from Barbary. Diavoli! and cazzo! and cappari! and Bacco! tripped up and exploded the Muses and Etruria. Rosini, the Pisan professor, their choregus, who, printer no less than professor and poet, had already struck off his Lamentation, spoke more calmly and reasonably than the rest, saying manfully, "Gabriel, take down those sheets in papal quarto, and throw them upon the Codes of Napoleon: the thing won't do." The expected and expecting heir was accused of falsifying the evidences; and fresh severities were added, for his attempts to corrupt justice.

Let me now revert to my first acquaintance with the Cavaliere. I never in my life accepted a letter of introduction, nor ever expressed a wish, whatever I might have felt, for any man's society. By some accident this peculiarity was mentioned to Puntomichino, and he called on me immediately. Returning his visit, I found him in the library: several English books were upon the table, and

A grey and willowy hue,'

but I found a fellow in Cockspur-street who procured me a favourable criticism for them. I went no further in expenditure, although Valpy was constantly at the heels of my groom Honorius, pressing him also to write a criticism on the Wolfdog of Erin for the Classical Journal; since I from ignorance of custom was too proud to do it; and assuring him that, look as he might, and shake his head as he would, he was no Jew, and would do the thing reasonably. Sir," added Mr. Talcranagh smartly, "are you a friend to dogs?"

"A thousand thanks to you, Mr. Talcranagh," cried I, "for asking me a question at last which I can answer in the affirmative. There is a sort of freemasonry among us, I verily believe; for no dog, except a cur, a pug, or a turnspit, ever barks at me; they and children love me universally. I have more than divided empire: these form the best part of the world." "Add the women," shouted he aloud," and here is my hand for you." We saluted cordially.

Indeed," said I, "Mr. Talcranagh, you have reason to be proud of your countrywomen, for their liveliness, their beauty, and their genius. The book before us, by Miss Edgeworth, which you were looking into, abounds in philosophy and patriotism; there is nothing of commonplace, nothing of sickly sentiment, nothing of insane enthusiasm. I read warily; and whenever I find the writings of a lady, the first thing I do, is to cast my eyes along her pages, to see whether I am likely to be annoyed by the traps and spring-guns of interjections, or if any French or Italian is sprinkled on the surface; and if I happen to espy them, I do not leap the paling. In these volumes I see much to admire, and nothing that goads or worries me into admiration."

stone. We have nothing now to give! no, not
even a bunch of roses to our Protectress over the
gate. . . mercy upon us!
Until this unproduc-
tive season we have always paid our rent: we are
now thirty crowns in arrears. We went to the
good old lady; she shook her head, and said she
would do what she could for us, but that her son
managed, and he already knew the case.' On
hearing this they will tell you, as they told me,
their courage forsook them, groans burst simul-
taneously from every breast, desperation seized
the adult and vigorous, agony the aged and infirm,
and the first articulate sounds they uttered, were,
O God! there is none to help us!' An English-
man of stern countenance came up at the begin-
ning of the narration: he looked at me with
defiance, and seemed to say internally, 'be off.'
As they continued to speak, he closed his lips
more strongly; the muscles of his jaw trembled
more and more; he opened his eyes wider; I
heard every breath of air he drew into his nostrils;
he clenched his fist, stamped with his heel into
the turf; cried, 'What can this cursed slave do
here?' and throwing down a card of address,
without a thought of their incapacity to read it,
Venite da me, cried he, in an accent rather like
fury than invitation. He walked away rapidly:
the wind was in his face: I saw something white
blown over his shoulder at intervals till he reached
the Porta San Gallo.

"Gentlemen," said the Cavaliere, "I am as warm an admirer of the Irish ladies in their authorship as either of you, and perhaps if one of them, lately here in Florence, had consulted me on a few matters and persons, I could have rendered her some service by setting her right. Travellers are profuse of praise and censure in proportion as they have been civilly or indecorously received, not inquiring nor caring whether the account be quite correct, if the personages of whom they write be of celebrity: for censure no less than praise requires a subject of notoriety. Many English and Irish court a stranger of rank in this city, who did not even put on mourning at the decease of his wife's brother, Napoleon, "There may formerly have been a virtuous or a though he owed to him the highest of his distinc-brave citizen in the family so extolled, and indeed tions, and the greater part of his unwieldy fortune. in what family has there not been, earlier or later? He suffered to die here, imprisoned for debt, a but if those who now compose it are called Russels, woman once lovely, generous, and confiding; who with equal right may the cast horses of a sandcart had ruined herself to make her house appear be called Bucephaluses. Strangers are disposed worthy of his reception. At the moment when to consider us the vilest and most contemptible she was breathing her last, in silence, in solitude, race in Europe; and they must appear to have in want of sustenance, his palace resounded with reason on their side, if such creatures are taken music, with dances, with applauses to archducal for the best of us. Not a single one of these guests and their magnificent entertainer. The flaming patriots ever subscribed a farthing to aid sum expended on that night's revelry would have the Spaniards or the Greeks, nor in furtherance released her from captivity, and would have of any agricultural or other useful association in rescued her from death. Our fair traveller does their own country. Allowing to the Russel of the not mention this but did she not know it? She Bologna-road all his merits, I insist for the honour has spoken of our patriots: what were they doing? of my native place that no inhabitant of it, be his They were contented to act in the character of condition what it may, has fewer: I do not debuffoons before the court. press the one, nor will I suffer the other to be depressed. Patriotism has here a different meaning from what it has in England. A patriot, with us, is a man who is unfriendly to any established government, and who, while he flatters a native prince, courts over an invader. His only griev ances are, to pay taxes for the support, and to carry arms for the defence, of his country. He would loosen the laws as impediments to the liberty of action, with a reserve of those which secure to him the fruits of rapine and confiscation: those are provident and conservative, and enthroned in light by the philanthropy of the age. Hospitality is the virtue of barbarians. . ?

"Do you wish a little anecdote of the Florentine Russel, as she called the man? Go half a mile up the road to Bologna, and you will probably see before their cottage a family of thirteen, in tears. Ask them why they weep: they will inform you that our Russel, who administers and manages the estates and affairs of his father, has given them notice to quit their vineyard. Ask them for what reason. They will reply, we are thirteen in number; God has willed it. Some of us are too old, others too young, for work: our family has lived upon this little plot for many generations: many a kind soul, now in Paradise, has drawn water from this well for the thirsty traveller: many a one has given the fig off his bread at noon, to the woman labouring with child, and resting on that

"Blood and hounds!" cried indignantly my young friend, "I would ask him, whoever he is, whether that was meant for me. If there is bar