the strongest of those instances, where the orator addresses himself to the senses and passions of his hearers but let the disciple tread this path with caution; let him wait the call, and be sure he has an occasion worthy of his efforts before he makes them.

Allegory, personification and metaphor will press upon him his imagination at certain times, but let him soberly consult his judgment in those moments, and weigh their fitness before he admits them into his style. As for allegory, it is at best but a kind of fairy form; it is hard to naturalize it, and it will rarely fill a graceful part in any manly composition. With respect to personification, as I am speaking of prose only, it is but an exotic ornament, and may be considered rather as the loan of the muses than as the property of prose; let our student therefore beware how he borrows the feathers of the jay, lest his unnatural finery should only serve to make him pointed at and despised. Metaphor, on the other hand, is common property, and he may take his share of it, provided he has discretion not to abuse his privilege, and neither surfeits the appetite with repletion, nor confounds the palate with too much variety let his metaphor be apposite, single and unconfused, and it will serve him as a kind of rhetorical lever to lift and elevate his style above the pitch of ordinary discourse; let him also so apply this machine, as to make it touch in as many points as possible; otherwise it can never so poise the weight above it, as to keep it firm and steady on its proper center.

To give an example of the right use and application of this figure, I again apply to a learned author already quoted- Our first parents having fallen from their native state of innocence, the tincture of evil, like an hereditary disease, infected all their

posterity; and the leaven of sin having once corrupted the whole mass of mankind, all the species ever after would be soured and tainted with it; the vicious ferment perpetually diffusing and propagating itself through all generations.'-(Bentley, Comm. Sermon.)

There will be found also in certain writers a profusion of words, ramifying indeed from the same root, yet rising into climax by their power and importance, which seems to burst forth from the overflow and impetuosity of the imagination: resembleing at first sight what Quintilian characterises as the Abundantia Juvenilis,' but which, when tempered by the hand of a master, will upon closer examination be found to bear the stamp of judgment under the appearance of precipitancy. I. need only turn to the famous Commencement Sermon' before quoted, and my meaning will be fully illustrated-Let them tell us then what is the chain, the cement, the magnetism, what they will call it, the invisible tie of that union, whereby matter and an incorporeal mind, things that have no similitude or alliance to each other, can so sympathize by a mutual league of motion and sensation. No; they will not pretend to that, for they can frame no conceptions of it: they are sure there is such an union from the operations and effects, but the cause and the manner of it are too subtle and secret to be discovered by the eye of reason: 'tis mystery, 'tis divine magic, 'tis natural miracle.'

NUMBER LXXXII.

Defunctus jam sum, nihil, est quod dicat mihi.

TERENT.

IN all ages of the world men have been in habits of praising the time past at the expence of the time present. This was done even in the Augustan æra, and in that witty and celebrated period the laudator temporis acti must have been either a very splenetic, or a very silly character.

Our present grumblers may perhaps be better warranted; but, though there may not be the same injustice in their cavilling complaints, there is more than equal impolicy in them; for if by discouraging their contemporaries they mean to mend them, they take a very certain method of counteracting their own designs; and if they have any other meaning, it must be something worse than impolitic, and they have more to answer for than a mere mistake.

Who but the meanest of mankind would wish to damp the spirit and degrade the genius of the country he belongs to? Is any man lowered by the dignity of his own nation, by the talents of his contemporaries? Who would not prefer to live in an enlightened and a rising age, rather than in a dark and declining one? It is natural to take a pride in the excellence of our free constitution, in the virtues of our Sovereign; is it not as natural to sympathize in the prosperity of our arts and sciences, in the reputation of our countrymen? But these splenetic dampers are for ever sighing over the decline of wit,

the decline of genius, the decline of literature, when if there is any one thing that has declined rather than another, it is the wretched state of criticism, so far as they have to do with it.

As I was passing from the city the other day, I turned into a coffee-house, and took my seat at a table, next to which some gentlemen had assembled, and were conversing over their coffee. A dispute was carried on between a little prattling volatile fellow and an old gentleman of a sullen, morose aspect, who in a dictatorial tone of voice was declaiming against the times, and treating them and their puisny advocate with more contempt than either one or the other seemed to deserve: still the little fellow, who had abundance of zeal and no want of words, kept battling with might and main for the world as it goes against the world as it had gone by, and I could perceive he had an interest with the junior part of his hearers, whilst the sullen orator was no less popular amongst the elders of the party: the little fellow, who seemed to think it no good reason why any work should be decried only because the author of it was living, had been descanting upon the merit of a recent publication, and had now shifted his ground from the sciences to the fine arts, where he seemed to have taken a strong post and stood resolutely to it; his opponent, who was not a man to be tickled out of his spleen by a few fine dashes of arts merely elegant, did not relish this kind of skirmishing argument, and tauntingly cried out- What tell you me of a parcel of gew-gaw artists, fit only to pick the pockets of a dissipated trifling age? You talk of your painters and portrait-mongers, what use are they of? Where are the philosophers and the poets, whose countenances might interest posterity to sit to them? Will they paint me a Bacon, a Newton, or a Locke? I defy

them: there are not three heads upon living should ers in the kingdom, worth the oil that would be wasted-upon them. Will they or you find me a Shakspeare, a Milton, a Dryden, a Pope, an Addison? You cannot find a limb, a feature, or even the shadow of the least of them: these were men worthy to be recorded; poets, who reached the very topmost summits of Parnassus; our moderns are but pismires crawling at its lowest root.'-This lofty defiance brought our little advocate to a nonplus; the moment was embarrassing; the champion of time past was echoed by his party with a ery of No, no! there are no such men as these now living.'- - I believe not,' he replied, I believe not: I could give you a score of names more, but these are enough: honest Tom Durfey would be more than a match for any poetaster now breathing.'

6

In this style he went on crowing and clapping his wings over a beaten cock, for our poor little champion seemed dead upon the pit: he muttered something between his teeth, as if struggling to pronounce some name that stuck in his throat; but either there was in fact no contemporary, whom he thought it safe to oppose to these Goliahs in the lists, or none were present to his mind at this moment.

Alas! thought I, your cause, my beloved contemporaries, is desperate: Va Viêtis! You are but dust in the scale, while this Brennus directs the beam. All that I have admired and applauded in my zeal for those with whom I have lived and still live; all that has hitherto made my heart expand with pride and reverence for the age and nation I belong to, will be immolated to the inanes of these departed worthies, whom though I revere, I cannot love and cherish with that sympathy of soul, which I feel towards you, my dear but degenerate contem. poraries!