rank call upon judgment to check its excrescencies and irregularities. I cannot conclude this paper without an animadversion upon one prevailing folly, of which both sexes are equally guilty, and which is attended with real ill consequences to the nation; I mean that rage of foreign fopperies, by which so considerable a sum of ready money is annually exported out of the kingdom, for things which ought not to be suffered to be imported even gratis. In order therefore to prevent, as far as I am able, this absurd and mischievous practice, I hereby signify, that I will shew a greater indulgence than ordinary to those who only expose themselves in the manufactures of their own country; and that they shall enjoy a connivance, in the nature of a drawback, to those excesses which otherwise I shall not tolerate. I must add, that if it is so genteel to copy the French even in their weaknesses, I should humbly hope it might be thought still more so, to imitate them where they really deserve imitation, which is in preferring every thing of their own to every thing of other people's. A Frenchman, who happened to be in England at the time of the last total eclipse of the sun, assured the people whom he saw looking at it with attention, that it was not to be compared to a French eclipse! Would some of our fine women emulate that spirit, and assert (as they might do with much more truth) that the foreign manufactures are not to be compared to the English, such a declaration would be worth two or three hundred thousand pounds a year to the kingdom, and operate more effectually than all the laws made for that purpose. The Roman ladies got the Oppian law, which restrained their dress, repealed, in spite of the unwearied opposition of the elder Cato. I exhort the British ladies to exert their powers to better purposes, and to revive, by their credit, the trade and manufactures of their own country, in spite of the supine negligence of those whose more immediate care it ought to be to cultivate and promote them. COMMON SENSE, Feb. 26, 1737. No. XXXVI. -For his verse renown'd, That sung the deeds of heroes; those who fell, LEONIDAS, 1. iv. p. 129, Sir, I am an old man, retired from the world, partly out of principle, but more, I fear, from laziness, having sense enough to see that things go ill, honesty enough to wish they went better, but not spirits enough to attempt myself to mend them, nor any great hopes from the activity of those who are engaged on one side or the other. This temper of mind has thrown me deeply into reading, that I may forget the present scene as much as possible; and, as of all kinds of reading the most proper for this purpose is poetry, I make that my chief study; especially Homer, which lies in my hall by the side of the family bible; and, next to that, is most reverenced by myself, my wife, and all my children, whom I breed up in the love and honour of it, as extremely conducing to make them good and worthy men. But that you 2 you that this may not mistake me, I must tell Homer is neither Barnes's nor Clark's, but Mr. Pope's; for as he makes him speak English full as well as he does his own tongue, and sometimes better, I am partial enough to my own country rather to choose to read him in a translation, which, of all I ever saw in any language, has most the spirit and grace of an original, After Homer, Virgil and Milton are my favourites; and Tasso too, though he pleases me the less, by having borrowed so much from the two former, that half his work is little less than theirs repeated. But the wish of my heart these many years has been, that it would please the muses, for my delight and entertainment, to raise up a genius who would scorn to borrow any thing; but, in the spirit of the ancients, without taking their thoughts, produce another original epic poem, I say, Sir, this has been my wish; but it was a wish not attended with the least degree of hope; on the contrary, from a contempt of my contemporaries, natural enough to people at my years, I should have been peevish with any body that had told me such a thing could possibly come to pass. In this disposition of mind, I was last week surprised with a new poem called "Leonidas," I took it up with the strongest prepossessions that could be formed by any man against it. In the first place, I had never heard the author's name; next, they told me he lived in the city, and was a merchant; then, he was a young man of five-and-twenty; and, lastly, it consisted of nine books; which, at first sight, was enough to startle any lazy fellow, as I have before confessed myself to be. And, to tell you the truth, I was the less disposed to like it, from not having seen it before it was in print; for, as I take myself to be a critic of distinction, I was a good deal piqued that the author did not send me his manuscript to peruse, as other authors have done of no small fame. All these objections created such a prejudice, that I was on the point of returning the Leonidas back again to my bookseller, without so much as having given it the reading; but my wife, who loves a new thing, prevailed upon me to look into it at least, and see the turn of it; which I ventured to do, in full persuasion that I should lay it by at the end of the first book. The first thing that surprised me was to find I could understand the language it was written in, which, for a writer of blank verse, is a very unusual condescension to his readers: but this |