stition below their true value, by making them seem unery worthless and hollow, as contemptible as they were sta This was the service he rendered to truth and mankind' be Candide is a masterpiece of wit. It has been called product of a scoffer's pen." It is, indeed, “ the product of fer's pen;" but after reading the Excursion, few people w......... it dull. It is in the most perfect keeping, and with at any ap pearance of effort. Every sentence tells, and the what reass like one sentence. There is something sublime in Marat sceptical indifference to moral good and evil. It is the repu of the grave. It is better to suffer this living death than a Ling martyrdom. "Nothing can touch him further" The mar of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of Rassias the execution is different. Voltaire says, "A great book is a evil" Dr. Johnson would have laboured this short app into a voluminous commonplace. Voltaire's traveler i a other work) being asked whether he likes black or w mutton best," replies that "he is indifferent, provided it is to marr Dr. Johnson did not get at a conclusion by so short a way as this. If Voltaire's licentiousness is objected to me, I say, at a be placed to its true account, the manners of the age and cert in which he lived. The lords and ladies of the bed, hamwr in the reign of Louis XV. found no fault with the immi tendency of his writings. Why then should our modern paras quarrel with them?—But to return.

He has al und great
His murai redecan

Young is a gloomy epigrammatist. powers both of thought and language. are sometimes excellent; but he spoils their beauty by overloading them with a religious horror, and at the same time giving them all the smart turns and quaint expresses É enigma or repartee in verse. The well known lines on Pracrastination are in his best manner.

"Be wise to day, tas madness to defer;
Next day the fatal precedent will plead,
Thus on till wisdoun is prash d out of kin,
Procrastination is the tharf of time
Year after year it steals till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a motnent leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

"Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, 'That all men are about to live,'
For ever on the brink of being born.
All pay themselves the compliment to think
They, one day, shall not drivel; and their pride
On this reversion takes up ready praise;

At least, their own; their future selves applauds;
How excellent that life they ne'er will lead !
Time lodg'd in their own hands is Folly's vails:
That lodg'd in Fate's, to Wisdom they consign;
The thing they can't but purpose they postpone.
"Tis not in Folly not to scorn a fool;

And scarce in human Wisdom to do more.

All promise is poor dilatory man,

And that through every stage. When young, indeed,
In full content, we, sometimes, nobly rest,
Un-anxious for ourselves; and only wish,
As dutcous sons, our fathers were more wisc.
At thirty man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought

Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same."

"And why? Because he thinks himself immortal,
All men think all men mortal, but themselves;
Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate
Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread;
But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where, past the shaft, no trace is found.
As from the wing no scar the sky retains ;

The parted wave no furrow from the keel;
So dies in human hearts the thought of death.
Ev'n with the tender tear which nature sheds

O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave.”

His Universal Passion is a keen and powerful satire; but the effort takes from the effect, and oppresses attention by perpetual and violent demands upon it. His tragedy of the Revenge is monkish and scholastic. Zanga is a vulgar caricature of Iago. The finest lines in it are the burst of triumph at the end, when his revenge is completed:

"Let Europe and her pallid sons go weep,

Let Afric on her hundred thrones rejoice," &c.

Collins is a writer of a very different stamp, who had perhaps less general power of mind than Young; but he had that true virida vis, that genuine inspiration, which alone can gre birth to the highest efforts of poetry. He leaves stings in the minds of his readers, certain traces of thought and freig which never wear out, because nature had left them in has wa mind. He is the only one of the minor poets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have draw the greatest things. The germ is there. He is sometimes affected, unmeaning and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpses of the bowers of Paradise, and has lofty aspirations after the est seats of the Muses. With a great deal of unsel and splendid patch-work, he has not been able to hide the d sterling ore of genius. In his best works there is an attac sz;ɔ city, a pathos, and fervour of imagination, which make us the more lament that the efforts of his mind were at first de pressed neglect and pecuniary embarrassment, and at length buried i the gloom of an unconquerable and fatal malady. How many poets have gone through all the horrors of poverty and contem and ended their days in moping melancholy or moody mae'

"We poets in our youth begin în gladness,

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madnem.”

Is this the fault of themselves, of nature in tempering them too fine a clay, or of the world, that spurner of living, and patria of dead merit? Read the account of Collins-with-hpes frustrated, with faculties blighted, at last when it was too lat for himself or others, receiving the deceitful favours of relenting Fortune, which served only to throw their sunshine on his decay, and to light him to an early grave. He wa fand sitting with every spark of imagination extinguished, and weh only the faint traces of memory and reason left-with only book in his room, the Bible; but that," he said, “ww best" A melancholy damp hung like an unwholesome m. upon his faculties—a canker had consumed the flower d life He produced works of genius, and the public regard them with scorn: he aimed at excellence that should be ha ewn, and his friends treated his efforts as the wanderings of

fatuity. The proofs of his capacity are, his Ode on Evening, his Ode on the Passions (particularly the fine personification of Hope,) his Ode to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines on Thomson's Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of which are admirable. But perhaps his Ode on the Poetical Character is the best of all. A rich distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud envelopes it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula. His Ode to Evening shows equal genius in the images and versification. The sounds steal slowly over the ear, like the gradual coming on of evening itself:

"If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,

Thy springs and dying gales,

O nymph reserv'd, while now the bright-haired sun
Sits on yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts
With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat,
With short shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn,

As oft he rises midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum.

Now teach me, maid compos'd,

To breathe some soften'd strain,

Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkling vale,
May not unseemly with its stillness suit,

As, musing slow, I hail

Thy genial, lov'd return!

For when thy folding star arising shows

His paly circlet, at his warning lamp
The fragrant Hours and Elves
Who slept in flow'rs the day,

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge
And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and, lovelier still,

The pensive Pleasures sweet

Prepare thy shadowy car;

son, and his School-mistress, which last is a perfect pere of writing.

Akenside had in him the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a great poet. He improved his Pleasures of the I nation in the subsequent editions, by pruning away a many redundances of style and ornament. Armstrong is bezen, though he has not chosen a very exhilarating subject-The AM of Preserving Health. Churchill's Satires on the Seth and Characters of the Players, are as good as the subject, deserved they are strong, coarse, and full of an air of hardened asurance I ought not to pass over without mention Green's Poem on Spleen, or Dyer's Grongar Hill.

The principal name of the period we are now come to is of Goldsmith, than which few names stand higher or farer the annals of modern literature One should have his own pes to describe him as he ought to be described—amiable, varand bland, with careless inimitable grace touching on every kund of excellence with manners unstudied, but a gentle heartperforming miracles of skill from pure happiness of na'ate, at d whose greatest fault was ignorance of his own wich As poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of our vers,lieto sit Pope, with traits of artless nature which Pope had not, and a peculiar felicity in his turns upon words, which he casta: repeated with delightful effect: such as

His lot, though small,

He sees that little lot, the lot of all "

"And turn'd and look d, and turn'd to look agum."

As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed a £÷ What reader is there in the civilised world who is n't the ter for the story of the washes which the worthy Dr Pdemel shed so deliberately with the pher--for the kis of the guinea which the Miss Primroses kept ur their pockets - the adventure of the picture of the V. ar ily, which could not be get into the house-and that of Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their har lor for the story of the case of shagreen spectacles and the cur thogony?