could be found in Asia Minor, and to have introduced them into Greece. Plato, on the contrary, when he planned a commonwealth, resolved to exclude all poets from his state. The readers of poetry will rejoice in the reflection, that Lycurgus was the founder of a real commonwealth, and Plato only dreamed of his, and his wild notions subsided in theory.

Ancient Mythology.

The ancients, with the dexterity of self-love, erected their passions into deities. Temples to Victory, to Venus Publica, to Fortune, to Theseus, for runaway slaves, were erected in their principal cities. Some temples were free to malefactors of all kinds; so that the ancients not only sacrificed to the virtues, but built temples to sanctify their vices. Yet we shall hear a christian writer of ancient history talk with great complacency of the elegant mythology of the ancients. -See Harwood and Adams's Greek and Roman Antiquities.

Cicero.

It seems singular that so great an orator, and, of course, master of so many of the figures and

* Gibbon.

modes of speech peculiar to poets, should fail to be himself even a moderate versifier. One line is upon record, as the production of his poetic efforts, in which a pun and a rhyme are combined,

"O fortunatum natam me consule Romam."

It seems he was also as indifferent a critic in poetry, when he speaks of Lucretius, and says, "Lucretius has few luminous passages which display genius, but is generally artificial."*

Sir Isaac Newton.

The portrait of this great man forms a very strong exception to any rule that writers on physiognomy have laid down to distinguish a man of genius by his countenance. In a letter of Bishop Atterbury to M. Thiriot, he says, "in the whole air of his face and make there was nothing of that penetrating sagacity which appears in his works. He had something rather languid in his look and manner, which did not raise any great expectation in those who did not know him." At Newnham, near Oxford, the seat of Earl Harcourt, is a picture, in which the character and air of the face exactly correspond with the Bishop's description.

*See Book ii. Epist. to his Brother, 2.

A Proser.

I have sometimes

the company of a He seemed to be his dull faculties

The author of the Picturesque, &c. 3 vols. 8vo. to illustrate the sameness and dulness of Mr. Browne's genius in landscape, compares him facetiously with a proser. seen a proser quite forlorn in man of brilliant imagination. dazzled with excess of light, totally unable to keep pace with the other's rapid ideas. I have afterwards observed the same man get close to a brother proser, and the two snails have travelled on so comfortably in their own slime, that they seemed to feel no more expression, of envy or pleasure from what they had heard, than a real snail may be supposed to do at the active bounds and leaps of a stag, or of a highmettled racer."~ Vol. i. page 384.

French Taste in the Arts.

Lord Orford, in his very amusing" Anecdotes of the Arts,"* to use a fashionable phrase, quizzes the taste of the French in painting and sculpture. Speaking of Watteau's pastoral landscapes, he says the shepherds and shepherdesses look like

* Vol. iv..

ladies and gentlemen from Versailles, and that even their sheep have a coquettish air. He relates a ludicrous anecdote of their taste in sculpture. "On the piers of a garden not far from Paris, I observed two coquette sphinxes. These lady-monsters had straw hats, gracefully smart, on one side of their heads, and silken cloaks half veiling their necks, all executed in stone."

Lord Monboddo.

To be blind to our own faults, yet to be lynxeyed to those of others, is not more common in moral than in literary censures. What reader is not disgusted and astonished to hear my Lord Monboddo utter his severe censure on the style of Tacitus the historian, in a collocation of terms which would subject the style of the critic to the He calls the commost contemptuous invective. position of Tacitus "the short and priggish cut of style, so much in use now."-Orig. and Prog. of Lang. 3 vols.

Swift's Tale of the Tub well described.

"Had this writing been published in a pagan or popish nation, who are justly impatient of all

This is teaching by example.

indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a Protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts, and the effects of public resentment, but he has been caressed and patronized by persons of great figure, and of all denominations." To this severe but just censure, the Dean of St. Patrick's could only retort by false wit and scurrility.

Definition and Description.

These terms, though often confounded in conversation, and even in writing, are yet very different. If a person should undertake to describe any thing, he gives it all the parts which properly belong to it; but if he define any thing, he gives it only those parts which exclusively belong to it, and mark its peculiar character. When Plato is said to have defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers; Diogenes, who was a sturdy logician, laughed at the attempt, and brought into the room where Plato and his audience were, a cock stripped of its feathers, and exclaimed in derision, "See Plato's man!"

* Blackmore's Essays, 1717.