e that did not see them? Those, I imagine, that uld find a man after God's own heart, are no ore likely to trust the Doctor's recommendation an the Player's; and as to Reason and Truth, ould they know their own faces, do you think, if ey looked in the glass, and saw themselves so bezened in tattered fringe and tarnished lace, in rench jewels, and dirty furbelows, the frippery of stroller's wardrobe?

Literature, to take it in its most comprehensive ense, and include every thing that requires invenon or judgment, or barely application and inustry, seems indeed drawing apace to its dissoluon, and remarkably since the beginning of the ar. I remember to have read Mr. Spence's pretty ook; though (as he then had not been at Rome or the last time) it must have increased greatly nce that in bulk. If you ask me what I read, I rotest I do not recollect one syllable; but only in eneral, that they were the best bred sort of men the world, just the kind of frinds one would ish to meet in a fine summer's evening, if one ished to meet any at all. The heads and tails of e dialogues, published separate in 16mo, would ake the sweetest reading in natiur for young entlemen of family and fortune, that are learning dance. I rejoice to hear there is such a crowd

This ridicule on the Platonic way of dialogue (as it as aimed to be, though nothing less resembles it) is, in y opinion, admirable. Lord Shaftsbury was the first who

ght, from such little remains, be moved to conler what he would have been; and to wish that 5 aven had granted him a longer life and a mind ore at ease.

I send you a few lines, though Latin, which you not like, for the sake of the subject;* it makes rt of a large design, and is the beginning of the urth book, which was intended to treat of the ssions. Excuse the three first verses; you know unity, with the Romans, is a poetical licence.

5, and consequently are but of small authority. the better ages, when every temple and public lding in Rome was peopled with imported deities d heroes, and when all the artists of reputation ey made use of were Greeks, what wonder, if eir eyes grew familiarised to Grecian forms and bits (especially in a matter of this kind, where much depends upon the imagination); and if ose figures introduced with them a belief of such bles, as first gave them being, and dressed them ut in their various attributes, it was natural then, nd (I should think) necessary, to go to the source self, the Greek accounts of their own religion; ut to say the truth, I suspect he was a little conersant in those books and that language; for he arely quotes any but Lucian, an author that falls n every body's way, and who lived at the very exremity of that period he has set to his enquiries, ater than any of the poets he has meddled with, and for that reason ought to have been regarded as but an indifferent authority; especially being à Syrian too. His book (as he says himself) is, I think, rather a beginning than a perfect work; but a beginning at the wrong end: For if any body should finish it by enquiring into the Greek mythology, as he proposes, it will be necessary to read it backward.

There are several little neglects, that one might have told him of, which I noted in reading it hastily; as page 311, a discourse about orange-trees,

sioned hv Virgil's "inter odoratum lauri ne