observing what little foundation there is for the general outcry in the literary world against the prevalence of German dramas on our stage. Did they not possess uncommon merit, they would not meet with such general approbation. Fashion has but a partial influence, but they have drawn tears from an audience in a barn as well as in a theatre royal; they have been welcomed with plaudits in every little market town in the three kingdoms as well as in the metropolis. Nature speaks but one language; she is alike intelligible to the peasant and the man of letters, the tradesman and the man of fashion. While the Muse of Germany shall continue to produce such plays as the Stranger and Lover's Vows,* who will not rejoice that translation is able to naturalize her efforts in our language?

MELANCHOLY HOURS.—No. I.

"There is a mood

(I sing not to the vacant and the young),

There is a kindly mood of Melancholy,

That wings the soul and points her to the skies."

DYER.

PHILOSOPHERS have divested themselves of their natural apathy, and poets have risen above themselves, in descanting on the pleasures of Melancholy. There is no mind so gross, no understanding so uncultivated, as to be incapable, at certain moments, and amid certain combinations, of feeling that sublime influence upon the spirits, which steals the soul from the petty anxieties of the world,

"And fits it to hold converse with the gods."

I speak of these plays only as adapted to our stage by the elegant pens of Mr. Thompson and Mrs. Inchbald.

I must confess, if such there be who never felt the divine abstraction, I envy them not their insensibility. For my own part, it is from the indulgence of this soothing power that I derive the most exquisite of gratifications. At the calm hour of moonlight, amid all the sublime serenity, the dead stillness of the night, or when the howling storm rages in the heavens, the rain pelts on my roof, and the winds whistle through the crannies. of my apartment, I feel the divine mood of melancholy upon me; I imagine myself placed upon an eminence, above the crowds who pant below in the dusty tracks of wealth and honor. The black catalogue of crimes and of vice, the sad tissue of wretchedness and woe, passes in review before me, and I look down upon man with an eye of pity and commiseration. Though the scenes which I survey be mournful, and the ideas they excite equally sombre, though the tears gush as I contemplate them, and my heart feels heavy with the sorrowful emotions they inspire, yet are they not unaccompanied with sensations of the purest and most ecstatic bliss.

It is to the spectator alone that melancholy is forbidding; in herself she is soft and interesting, and capable of affording pure and unalloyed delight. Ask the lover why he muses by the side of the purling brook, or plunges into the deep gloom of the forest. Ask the unfortunate why he seeks the still shades of solitude, or the man who feels the pangs of disappointed ambition, why he retires into the silent walks of seclusion, and he will tell you that he derives a pleasure therefrom which nothing else can impart. It is the delight of melancholy; but the melancholy of these beings is as far removed from that of the philosopher as are the narrow and contracted complaints of selfishness from the mournful regrets of expansive philanthropy; as are the

desponding intervals of insanity from the occasional depressions of benevolent sensibility.

The man who has attained that calm equanimity which qualifies him to look down upon the petty evils of life with indifference, who can so far conquer the weakness of nature as to consider the sufferings of the individual of little moment, when put in competition with the welfare of the community, is alone the true philosopher. His melancholy is not excited by the retrospect of his own misfortunes; it has its rise from the contemplation of the miseries incident to life and the evils which obtrude themselves upon society and interrupt the harmony of nature. It would be arrogating too much merit to myself to assert that I have a just claim to the title of a philosopher, as it is here defined; or to say that the speculations of my melancholy hours are equally disinterested; be this as it may, I have determined to present my solitary effusions to the public: they will at least have the merit of novelty to recommend them, and may possibly, in some measure, be instrumental in the melioration of the human heart or the correction of false prepossessions. This is the height of my ambition: this once attained, and my end will be fully accomplished. One thing I can safely promise, though far from being the coinages of a heart at ease, they will contain neither the querulous captiousness of misfortune nor the bitter taunts of misanthropy. Society is a chain of which I am merely a link; all men are my associates in error, and though some may have gone farther in the ways of guilt than myself, yet it is not in me to sit in judgment upon them: it is mine to treat them rather in pity than in anger, to lament their crimes, and to weep over their sufferings. As these papers will be the amusement of those hours of relaxation when the mind recedes from

the vexations of business, and sinks into itself for a mo-
ment of solitary case, rather than the efforts of literary
leisure, the reader will not expect to find in them un-
usual elegance of language or studied propriety of style.
In the short and, necessary intervals of cessation from
the anxieties of an irksome employment, one finds little
time to be solicitous about expression. If, therefore, the
fervor of a glowing mind express itself in too warm and
luxuriant a manner for the cold ear of dull propriety, let
the fastidious critic find a selfish pleasure in descrying
it.
To criticism melancholy is indifferent. If learning
cannot be better employed than in declaiming against
the defects while it is insensible to the beauties of a
performance, well may we exclaim with the poet :-

Ω εὐμένης ἄγνοια ὡς ἀμωμός τις εἶ
Οταν οι συ οὐ έχεις δντως σ ̓ οὐκ αγνοεί.

MELANCHOLY HOURS.-No. II.

"But (wel-a-day) who loves the Muses now?
Or helpes the climber of the sacred hyll?
None leane to them, but strive to disalow
All heavenly dewes the goddesses distill."

WM. BROWNE'S SHEPHEARD'S PIPE. Eg. 5.

It is a melancholy reflection, and a reflection which often sinks heavily on my soul, that the sons of Genius generally seem predestined to encounter the rudest storms of adversity, to struggle, unnoticed, with poverty and misfortune. The annals of the world present us with many corroborations of this remark; and, alas! who can tell how many unhappy beings, who might have shone with distinguished lustre among the stars which illumine our hemisphere, may have sunk unknown beneath the pressure of

untoward circumstances; who knows how many may have shrunk, with all the exquisite sensibility of genius, from the rude and riotous discord of the world into the peaceful slumbers of death. Among the number of those whose talents might have elevated them to the first rank of eminence, but who have been overwhelmed with the accumulated ills of poverty and misfortune, I do not hesitate to rank a young man whom I once accounted it my greatest happiness to be able to call my friend.

CHARLES WANELEY was the only son of an humble village rector, who just lived to give him a liberal education and then left him unprovided for and unprotected, to struggle through the world as well as he could. With a heart glowing with the enthusiasm of poetry and romance, with a sensibility the most exquisite, and with an indignant pride which swelled in his veins, and told him he was a man, my friend found himself cast upon the wide world, at the age of sixteen, an adventurer, without fortune and without connection. As his independent spirit could not brook the idea of being a burden to those whom his father had taught him to consider only as allied by blood, and not by affection, he looked about him for a situation, which could insure to him, by his own exertions, an honorable competence. It was not long before such a situation offered, and Charles precipitately articled himself to an attorney, without giving himself time to consult his own inclinations, or the disposition of his master. The transition from Sophocles and Euripides, Theocritus and Ovid, to Finche and Wood, Coke and Wynne, was striking and difficult; but Charles applied himself with his wonted ardor to his new study, as considering it not only his interest but his duty so to do. It was not long, however, before he discovered that he disliked the law, that he disliked his