iron; with thee to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled. Gracious Heaven! cried I, kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, grant me but health, thou great bestower of it, and give me but this fair goddess as my companion, and shower down thy mitres, if it seem good unto thy divine providence, upon those heads which are aching for them. The bird in his cage pursued me into my room. I sat down close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I began to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I was in a right frame for it, and so I gave full scope to my imagination. I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow-creatures born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me, I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture. I beheld his body half-wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deferred. Upon looking nearer, I saw him pale and feverish; in thirty years the western breeze had not once fanned his blood; he had seen no sun, no moon, in all that time, nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice; his children-but here my heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait. He was sitting upon the ground upon a little straw, in the furthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately his chair and bed: a little calendar of small sticks lay at the head, notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed there; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with a rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the heap. As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye towards the door, then cast it down, shook his head, and went on with his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs, as he turned his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle. He gave a deep sigh: I saw the iron enter into his soul. I burst into tears; could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn. [A French Peasant's Supper.] A shoe coming loose from the fore-foot of the thillhorse, at the beginning of the ascent of Mount Taurira, the postilion dismounted, twisted the shoe off, and put it in his pocket. As the ascent was of five or six miles, and that horse our main dependence, I made a point of having the shoe fastened on again as well as we could; but the postilion had thrown away the nails, and the hammer in the chaise-box being of no great use without them, I submitted to go on. He had not mounted half a mile higher, when, coming to a flinty piece of road, the poor devil lost a second shoe, and from off his other fore-foot. I then got out of the chaise in good earnest; and seeing a house about a quarter of a mile to the left hand, with a great deal to do I prevailed upon the postilion to turn up to it. The look of the house, and of everything about it, as we drew nearer, soon reconciled me to the disaster. It was a little farm-house, surrounded with about twenty acres of vineyard, about as much corn; and close to the house on one side was a potagerie of an acre and a-half, full of everything which could make plenty in a French peasant's house; and on the other side was a little wood, which furnished wherewithal to dress it. It was about eight in the evening when I got to the house; so I left the postilion to manage his point as he could, and for mine, I walked directly into the house. The family consisted of an old grayheaded man and his wife, with five or six sons and sons-in-law and their several wives, and a joyous genealogy out of them. They were all sitting down together to their lentil-soup; a large wheaten loaf was in the middle of the table; and a flagon of wine at each end of it promised joy through the stages of the repast; 'twas a feast of love. The old man rose up to meet me, and with a respectful cordiality would have me sit down at the table; my heart was set down the moment I entered the room, so I sat down at once like a son of the family; and to invest myself in the character as speedily as I could, I instantly borrowed the old man's knife, and taking up the loaf, cut myself a hearty luncheon; and as I did it, I saw a testimony in every eye, not only of an honest welcome, but of a welcome mixed with thanks that I had not seemed to doubt it. Was it this, or tell me Nature what else it was, that made this morsel so sweet; and to what magic I owe it, that the draught I took of their flagon was so delicious with it, that they remain upon my palate to this hour? If the supper was to my taste, the grace which followed it was much more so. When supper was over, the old man gave a knock upon the table with the haft of his knife, to bid them prepare for the dance. The moment the signal was given, the women and girls ran all together into a back apartment to tie up their hair, and the young men to the door to wash their faces and change their sabots; and in three minutes every soul was ready, upon a little esplanade before the house, to begin. The old man and his wife came out last, and placing me betwixt them, sat down upon a sofa of turf by the door. The old man had some fifty years ago been no mean performer upon the vielle; and at the age he was then of, touched it well enough for the purpose. His wife sung now and then a little to the tune, then intermitted, and joined her old man again as their children and grandchildren danced before them. It was not till the middle of the second dance, when, for some pauses in the movement, wherein they all seemed to look up, I fancied I could distinguish an elevation of spirit different from that which is the cause or the effect of simple jollity. In a word, I thought I beheld Religion mixing in the dance; but as I had never seen her so engaged, I should have looked upon it now as one of the illusions of an imagination which is eternally misleading me, had not the old man, as soon as the dance ended, said that this was their constant way; and that all his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice; believing, he said, that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to Heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay. Or a learned prelate either, said I. DR SAMUEL JOHNSON. In 1759 DR JOHNSON published his moral tale of Rasselas, which he wrote in the nights of one week to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. The scene is laid in the east, but the author makes no attempt to portray the minutiae of eastern manners. It is in fact a series of essays on various subjects of morality and religion-on the efficacy of pilgrimages, the state of departed souls, the probability of the re-appearance of the dead, the dangers of solitude, &c., on all which the philosopher and prince of Abyssinia talk exactly as Johnson talked for more than twenty years in his house at Bolt Court, or in the club. Young said 'Rasselas' was a mass of sense,' and its moral precepts are certainly conveyed in striking and happy language. The mad astronomer, who imagined that he possessed the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons, is an original character in romance, and the happy valley, in which 'Rasselas' resides, is sketched with poetical feeling. The habitual melancholy of Johnson is apparent in this work-as when he nobly apostrophises the river Nile-Answer, great Father of waters! thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations, to the invocations of the daughter of thy native king. Tell me if thou waterest, through all thy course, a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of complaint.' When Johnson afterwards penned his depreciatory criticism of Gray, and upbraided him for apostrophising the Thames, adding coarsely, 'Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself,' he forgot that he had written 'Rasselas.' picture that walks out of its frame, or a skeleton's ghost in a hermit's cowl. Where Walpole has improved on the incredible and mysterious, is in his dialogues and style, which are pure and dramatic in effect, and in the more delicate and picturesque tone which he has given to chivalrous manners. Walpole was the third son of the Whig minister, Sir Robert Walpole; was born in 1717, became fourth Earl of Orford 1791, and died in 1797; having not only outlived most of his illustrious contemporaries, but recorded their weaknesses and failings, their private history and peculiarities, in his unrivalled correspondence. CHARLES JOHNSTONE. In 1760 The Adventures of a Guinea, by CHARLES JOHNSTONE, amused the town by its sketches of contemporary satire. A second edition was published the same year, and a third in 1761, when the author considerably augmented the work. Johnstone published other novels, which are now utterly forgotten. He went to India in 1782, and was a proprietor of one of the Bengal newspapers. He died in 1800. As Dr Johnson (to whom the manuscript was shown by the bookseller) advised the publication of The Adventures of a Guinea,' and as it experienced considerable success, the novel may be presumed to have possessed superior merit. It exhibits a variety of incidents, related in the style of Le Sage and Smollett, but the satirical portraits are overcharged, and the author, like Juvenal, was too fond of lashing and exaggerating the vices of his age. One of the critics of the novel says, 'it leads us along all the gloomy, and foul, and noisome passages of life, and we escape from it with the feeling of relief with which we would emerge from a vault in which the air was loaded with noxious vapours.' To such satirists who only paint The baser sides of literature and life, may be contrasted the healthy tone of feeling evinced by Fielding and Smollett, and the playful sarcastic wit of Sterne. HORACE WALPOLE. In 1764 HORACE WALPOLE revived the Gothic romance in his interesting little story, The Castle of Otranto, which he at first published anonymously, as a work found in the library of an ancient Catholic Lovelpole family in the north of England, and printed at Naples in the black letter in 1529. 'I wished it to be believed ancient,' he said, and almost everybody was imposed upon.' The tale was so well received by the public, that a second edition was soon called for, to which the author prefixed his name. Though designed to blend the two kinds of romance-the ancient, in which all was imagination and improbability, and the modern, in which nature is copied, the peculiar taste of Walpole, who loved to gaze on Gothic toys through Gothic glass,' and the nature of his subject, led him to give the preponderance to the antique. The ancient romances have nothing more incredible than a sword which required a hundred men to lift it; a helmet, that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham; the residence In the spring of 1766 came out a tale of about equal dimensions with Walpole's Gothic story, but as different in its nature as an English cottage or villa, with its honey-suckle hedge, wall-roses, neat garden, and general air of beauty and comfort, is from a gloomy feudal tower, with its dark walls, moat, and drawbridge. We allude to Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Though written two years before, and sold for sixty guineas, the bookseller had kept it back, doubtful of success, till the publication of The Traveller had given Goldsmith a name. Its reception by the public must have been an agreeable surprise. The first edition was published on the 27th of March, a second was called for in May, and a third in August of the same year. What reader could be insensible to the charms of a work so full of kindliness, benevolence, taste, and genius? By that species of mental chemistry which he understood as well as Sterne, Goldsmith extracted the essence of character, separating from it what was trite and worthless, and presenting in incredibly small space a finished representation, bland, humorous, simple, absurd, or elevated, as the story might require. The passions were equally at his bidding within that confined sphere to which he limited their range; and a life of observation and reading (though foolish in action) supplied him with a pregnancy of thought and illustration, the full value of The first novel of Mackenzie is the best of his works, unless we except some of his short contributions to the Mirror' and 'Lounger' (as the tale of La Roche), which fully supported his fame. There is no regular story in The Man of Feeling,' but the character of Harley, his purity of mind, and his bashfulness, caused by excessive delicacy, interest the reader from the commencement of the tale. His adventures in London, the talk of club and park frequenters, his visit to bedlam, and his relief of the old soldier, Atkins, and his daughter, though partly formed on the affected sentimental style of the inferior romances, evince a facility in moral and pathetic painting that was then only surpassed by Richardson. His humour is chaste and natural. Harley fails, as might be expected from his diffident and retiring character, in securing the patronage of the great in London, and he returns to the country, meeting with some adventures by the way that illustrate his fine sensibility and benevolence. Though bashful, Harley is not effeminate, and there are bursts of manly feeling and generous sentiment throughout the work, which at once elevate the character of the hero, and relieve the prevailing tone of pathos in the novel. The Man of the World' has less of the discursive manner of Sterne, but the character of Sir Thomas Sindall-the Lovelace of the novel-seems forced and unnatural. His plots against the family of Annesly, and his attempted seduction of Lucy (after an interval of some eighteen or twenty years), show a deliberate villany and disregard of public opinion, which, considering his rank and position in the world, appears improbable. His death-bed sensibility and penitence are undoubtedly out of keeping with the rest of his character. The adventures of young Annesly among chains and torture? No; thou gavest them a land teeming with good things, and lightedst up thy sun to bring forth spontaneous plenty; but the refinements of man, ever at war with thy works, have changed this scene of profusion and luxuriance into a theatre of rapine, of slavery, and of murder! Forgive the warmth of this apostrophe! Here it would not be understood; even my uncle, whose heart is far from a hard one, would smile at my romance, and tell me that things must be so. Habit, the tyrant of nature and of reason, is. deaf to the voice of either; here she stifles humanity and debases the species-for the master of slaves has seldom the soul of a man.' We add a specimen of the humorous and the pathetic manner of Mackenzie from The Man of Feeling.' [Harley Sets Out on his Journey-The Beggar and his Dog.] He had taken leave of his aunt on the eve of his She Peter stood at the door. We have mentioned this intended departure; but the good lady's affection for her nephew interrupted her sleep, and early as it was, next morning when Harley came down stairs to set out, he found her in the parlour with a tear on her cheek, and her caudle-cup in her hand. knew enough of physic to prescribe against going abroad of a morning with an empty stomach. She gave her blessing with the draught; her instructions she had delivered the night before. They consisted mostly of negatives; for London, in her idea, was so replete with temptations, that it needed the whole armour of her friendly cautions to repel their attacks. faithful fellow formerly. Harley's father had taken him up an orphan, and saved him from being cast the Indians are interesting and romantic, and are described with much spirit: his narrative, indeed, the service of him and of his son. Harley shook him on the parish; and he had ever since remained in is one of the freest and boldest of Mackenzie's by the hand as he passed, smiling, as if he had said, sketches. Julia de Roubigne' is still more melan-I will not weep.' He sprung hastily into the chaise choly than The Man of the World.' It has no gorgeous descriptions or imaginative splendour to relieve the misery and desolation which overtake a group of innocent beings, whom for their virtues the reader would wish to see happy. It is a domestic tragedy of the deepest kind, without much discrimination of character or skill in the plot, and oppressive from its scenes of unmerited and unmitigated distress. We wake from the perusal of the tale as from a painful dream, conscious that it has no reality, and thankful that its morbid excitement is over. It is worthy of remark that in this novel Mackenzie was one of the first to denounce the system of slave-labour in the West Indies. 'I have often been tempted to doubt,' says one of the characters in Julia de Roubigne, whether there is not an error in the whole plan of negro servitude; and whether whites or creoles born in the West Indies, or perhaps cattle, after the manner of European husbandry, would not do the business better and cheaper than the slaves do. The money which the latter cost at first, the sickness (often owing to despondency of mind) to which they are liable after their arrival, and the proportion that die in consequence of it, make the machine, if it may be so called, of a plantation, extremely expensive in its operations. In the list of slaves belonging to a wealthy planter, it would astonish you to see the number unfit for service, pining under disease, a burden on their master. I am only talking as a merchant; but as a man-good heavens! when I think of the many thousands of my fellow-creatures groaning under servitude and misery!-great God! hast thou peopled those regions of thy world for the purpose of casting out their inhabitants to that waited for him; Peter folded up the step. My dear master,' said he, shaking the solitary lock that hung on either side of his head, I have been told as how London is a sad place.' He was choked with the thought, and his benediction could not be heard. But it shall be heard, honest Peter! where these tears will add to its energy. In a few hours Harley reached the inn where he proposed breakfasting; but the fulness of his heart would not suffer him to eat a morsel. He walked out on the road, and gaining a little height, stood gazing on the quarter he had left. He looked for his wonted prospect, his fields, his woods, and his hills; they were lost in the distant clouds! He pencilled them on the clouds, and bade them farewell with a sigh! He sat down on a large stone to take out a little pebble from his shoe, when he saw, at some distance, a beggar approaching him. He had on a loose sort of coat, mended with different-coloured rags, amongst which the blue and the russet were the predominant. He had a short knotty stick in his hand, and on the top of it was stuck a ram's horn; his knees (though he was no pilgrim) had worn the stuff of his breeches; he wore no shoes, and his stockings had entirely lost that part of them which should have covered his feet and ankles. In his face, however, was the plump appearance of good humour: he walked a good round pace, and a crooked-legged dog trotted at his heels. 'Our delicacies,' said Harley to himself, are fantastic: they are not in nature! that beggar walks over the sharpest of these stones barefooted, while I have lost the most delightful dream in the world from the smallest of them happening to get into my shoe.' The beggar had by this time come up, and, pulling off a piece of hat, asked charity of Harley; the dog began to beg too. It was impossible to resist both; and, in truth, the want of shoes and stockings had made both unnecessary, for Harley had destined sixpence for him before. The beggar, on receiving it, poured forth blessings without number; and, with a sort of smile on his countenance, said to Harley, 'that if he wanted his fortune told Harley turned his eye briskly on the beggar: it was an unpromising look for the subject of a prediction, and silenced the prophet immediately. I would much rather learn,' said Harley, 'what it is in your power to tell me your trade must be an entertaining one: sit down on this stone, and let me know something of your profession; I have often thought of turning fortune-teller for a week-or two myself.' 'Master,' replied the beggar, I like your frankness much; God knows I had the humour of plain dealing in me from a child; but there is no doing with it in this world; we must live as we can, and lying is, as you call it, my profession: but I was in some sort forced to the trade, for I dealt once in telling truth. | I was a labourer, sir, and gained as much as to make me live: I never laid by indeed; for I was reckoned a piece of a wag, and your wags, I take it, are seldom rich, Mr Harley.' 'So,' said Harley, 'you seem to know me.' Ay, there are few folks in the country that I don't know something of; how should I tell fortunes else?' True; but to go on with your story: you were a labourer, you say, and a wag; your industry, I suppose, you left with your old trade; but your humour you preserve to be of use to you in your new.' What signifies sadness, sir? a man grows lean on't but I was brought to my idleness by degrees; first I could not work, and it went against my stomach to work ever after. I was seized with a jail fever at the time of the assizes being in the county where lived; for I was always curious to get acquainted with the felons, because they are commonly fellows of much mirth and little thought, qualities I had ever an esteem for. In the height of this fever, Mr Harley, the house where I lay took fire, and burnt to the ground; I was carried out in that condition, and lay all the rest of my illness in a barn. I got the better of my disease, however, but I was so weak that I spit blood whenever I attempted to work. I had no relation living that I knew of, and I never kept a friend above a week when I was able to joke; I seldom remained above six months in a parish, so that I might have died before I had found a settlement in any: thus I was forced to beg my bread, and a sorry trade I found it, Mr Harley. I told all my misfortunes truly, but they were seldom believed; and the few who gave me a halfpenny as they passed, did it with a shake of the head, and an injunction not to trouble them with a long story. In short, I found that people do not care to give alms without some security for their money; a wooden leg or a withered arm is a sort of draught upon heaven for those who choose to have their money placed to account there; so I changed my plan, and, instead of telling my own misfortunes, began to prophesy happiness to others. This I found by much the better way: folks will always listen when the tale is their own; and of many who say they do not believe in fortune-telling, I have known few on whom it had not a very sensible effect. I pick up the names of their acquaintance; amours and little squabbles are easily gleaned among servants and neighbours; and indeed people themselves are the best intelligencers in the world for our purpose; they dare not puzzle us for their own sakes, for every one is anxious to hear what they wish to believe; and they who repeat it, to laugh at it when they have done, are generally more serious than their hearers are apt to imagine. With a tolerable good memory and some share of cunning, with the help of walking a-nights over heaths and churchyards, with this, and showing the tricks of that there dog, whom I stole from the sergeant of a marching regiment (and, by the way, he can steal too upon occasion), I make shift to pick up a livelihood. My trade, indeed, is none of the honestest; yet people are not much cheated neither, who give a few halfpence for a prospect of happiness, which I have heard some persons say is all a man can arrive at in this world. But I must bid you good day, sir; for I have three miles to walk before noon, to inform some boarding-school young ladies whether their husbands are to be peers of the realm or captains in the army; a question which I promised to answer them by that time.' Harley had drawn a shilling from his pocket; but Virtue bade him consider on whom he was going to bestow it. Virtue held back his arm; but a milder form, a younger sister of Virtue's, not so severe as Virtue, nor so serious as Pity, smiled upon him; his fingers lost their compression; nor did Virtue offer to catch the money as it fell. It had no sooner reached the ground, than the watchful cur (a trick he had been taught) snapped it up; and, contrary to the most approved method of stewardship, delivered it immediately into the hands of his master. [The Death of Harley.] Harley was one of those few friends whom the malevolence of fortune had yet left me; I could not, therefore, but be sensibly concerned for his present indisposition; there seldom passed a day on which I did not make inquiry about him. The physician who attended him had informed me the evening before, that he thought him considerably better than he had been for some time past. I called next morning to be confirmed in a piece of intelligence so welcome to me. When I entered his apartment, I found him sitting on a couch, leaning on his hand, with his eye turned upwards in the attitude of thoughtful inspiration. His look had always an open benignity, which commanded esteem; there was now something more-a gentle triumph in it. He rose, and met me with his usual kindness. When I gave him the good accounts I had had from his physician, I am foolish enough,' said he, 'to rely but little in this instance to physic. My presentiment may be false; but I think I feel myself approaching to my end by steps so easy that they woo me to approach it. There is a certain dignity in retiring from life at a time when the infirmities of age have not sapped our faculties. This world, my dear Charles, was a scene in which I never much delighted. I was not formed for the bustle of the busy nor the dissipation of the gay; a thousand things occurred where I blushed for the impropriety of my conduct when I thought on the world, though my reason told me I should have blushed to have done otherwise. It was a scene of dissimulation, of restraint, of disappointment. I leave it to enter on that state which I have learned to believe is replete with the genuine happiness attendant upon virtue. I look back on the tenor of my life with the consciousness of few great offences to account for. There are blemishes, I confess, which deform in some degree the picture; but I know the benignity of the Supreme Being, and rejoice at the thoughts of its exertion in my favour. My mind expands at the thought I shall enter into the society of the blessed, wise as angels, with the simplicity of children.' · He had by this time clasped my hand, and found it wet by a tear which had just fallen upon it. His eye began to moisten too-we sat for some time silent. |