Various, that the mind of desultory man, studious of change and pleased with novelty, may be indulged-Cowp. Vol. V. Philadelphia, Saturday, April 30, 1808. For The Port Folio. TRAVELS. ORIGINAL PAPERS. LETTERS FROM GENEVA AND FRANCE. Written during a residence of between two and three years in different parts of those countries, and addressed to a lady in Virginia. (Continued from page 259.) LETTER XIII. My dear E THE country we travelled through continued such as we had seen, being diversified with wheat fields, vineyards, plantations of olive and mulberry trees, but we began to observe mountains at a distance, and the road was sometimes hilly, so that the festoons of grapes, which lined the way, were now a little more in our power, for as the carriage necessarily went more slowly, we were at times enabled to get out and walk; such a circumstance was never disagreeable to the younger part of the family, and to our servant-maid whose appearance you must remember; No. 18. her looks upon such occasions, when she found herself in the undisturbed possession of as many grapes as she chose to eat, gave me an idea of what Candid's must have been, when offering to return the pieces of gold which the children had left behind, he was told, to his great astonishment, that he might keep them. Nismes was once, under the government of the Romans, a city of great extent, but of its ancient walls nothing now remains, but one solitary dismantled tower, which is at a considerable distance from the modern town; it contains, however, more Roman antiquities and in a greater state of preservation than any town of France: you have often heard of the celebrated Maison Quarree, (the model after which the Capitol of Richmond was originally planned;) it is a Roman temple of the smaller size, all elegance and simplicity, perfectly entire, but disfigured by dormant windows, which had been opened by a society of Monks, who used it formerly as a Chapel: prepared as one is to admire it, the impression at first sight, rather falls short of the spectator's imagination, and it appears diminutive: at a small distance from it is the amphitheatre, the form of which you are acquainted with, but it would be difficult for you to conceive an idea of the effect which its extreme magnitude and venerable antiquity have upon the mind. Although far from being entire, it is in some parts sufficiently preserved to convey an idea of what it must have been formerly, and one easily conceives how seventeen thousand persons may have sat at their ease in it. We went in at the ancient entrance, walked for sometime in the lobby, as I should call it in a modern theatre, then penetrated by one of the vomitories to the seats, and ascended to the top of the building, where we remained for sometime in silent contemplation of this mighty edifice. It seemed worthy of those who had been masters of the world, and they now appeared to us capable of having performed all the great things which history has attributed to them. Upwards of seventeen hundred years had rolled away since the amphitheatre was built, and yet where avarice or the fury of an enemy have not made great efforts to destroy it, the parts are as entire as if it had been erected in the last century. The arena is still encumbered with some wretched houses, to the - very great disgrace of the town and the government; but elevated as we were, the extent and form of it were very apparent. There are other remain's of former times at Nismes, which in any other place would be remarkable, but are here scarcely noticed there are remains for instance of atemple, said to be of Diana or of the infernal deities, for antiquarians are not agreed upon the subject, which are yet sufficiently entire to give a very good idea of its original form; a part of the roof is still suspended in the air, and the ornaments of the ceiling, as far as it extends, are perfect: there is a niche in front of the principal entrance over where the altar was, no doubt, formerly occupied by a statue, and the funnel which gave passage to the smoke of the victims, might serve for the same purpose now; near it, is a spot, once sacred to some other deity, where a profusion of water bursts from the earth, is made to adorn a publick garden, amidst statues and ornaments of architecture, and then forms a canal, which supplies many of the different manufactories of the town: -this spot, which is called the fountain, and which in summer joins the freshness of a running stream to all the delights of shade, is, as you may suppose, a very favourite one at that season. You must observe that I have purposely avoided speaking of the revolution and its effects; I cannot, however, refrain mentioning in this place that the weavers of Nismes have been reduced from more than four to less than one thousand. It formerly suffered as much from the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and was the theatre of many of those horrid instances of persecution, which that impolitick event gave rise to: the enmity of the two religious parties, embittered by a long continuation of atrocious conduct towards each other, more worthy the disciples of some ancient Egyptian deity, than of the God of Peace, had been in a great measure lulled to rest; when Louis XIV, blinded by the zeal of his confessor, and not restrained by any remains of sensibility in Madame Maintenon for her former friends, excited the worst of all civil wars: the cruel circumstances and consequences of this contest, the character of Cavalier, who, from a baker's boy, became the leader of the Protestants, the arts, he made use of to keep up his ascendency over his followers, by means of Prophets chiefly, who were generally women, the chosen vehicle of the Divine Spirit, and the singular circumstance of his reducing government to the necessity of treating with him at last, are all well described by Voltaire, to whom I refer you; he does not, however, I believe, mention the particular circumstance which drove the people into open rebellion. They had submitted to the most humiliating restrictions in the exercise of their religion, and had groaned in secret amidst all that could be perpetrated of cruelty, all that could be heaped upon them of injury and insult; but there is a point beyond which men will suffer no longer, and the slightest event is sometimes sufficient to kindle up a flame, where the materials have been long accumulated. Two young ladies of the name of Sexti, were carried off from their parents, and immured with circumstances of great indignity in the castle of an Abbe the principal agent of the government; neither entreaties, nor the offer of money could procure their liberation; the people of the neighbouring mountains at length excited and led on by the relations of the sufferers, rose in a mass, stormed the castle, liberated the ladies from a state of shocking confinement, and put the Abbe to death. POLITE LITERATURE. LETTERS FROM BRUTUS. LETTER III. To the Right Hon. Elmund Burke. SIR, Party-writers have so accustomed us to expect abuse in addresses of this sort, that I am obliged to preface this letter with a declaration, that I am more an admirer of your good qualities than an observer of your failings. In the distant retirement of private life, political opinions are mellowed into speculative mildness, and do not rise in our bosoms with that personal acrimony which sets. down a man's character merely from his party. Though I feel with, I believe, a very great majority of my fellow-citizens, much respect and 275 gratitude to men against whom you have been long in opposition, yet I am neither blind to their imperfections nor to your merits. When their imperfections shall appear to diminish their usefulness to the publick, I will speak my opinion with the same regret with which I have seen your merits rendered useless or hurtful to it. I feel for my country, Sir; and I am grieved when, on either side, virtues or talents are lost to its service, or misapplied to its prejudice. I own I indulge a certain degree of In my sense of your merits, Sir, vanity. It is not a vulgar mind they can affect or attach. You have been unfortunate in the exertion of your talents possessing popular virtues and popular abilities, your publick conduct and publick appearances have but seldom won the suffrages of the people. There was a refinement in your virtue, an abstraction in your eloquence, which it required something of a philosopher and a scholar to relish; plain men denied the one, and did not always understand the other. Hence, perhaps, arose the ridiculous fable of your education at St. Omer's, and your being designed for a member of a religious order sometime ago abolished in the greatest part of Europe; a story which had less foundation than almost any other in the mythology of the vulgar. You had the genius and the learning, but you wanted the prudence and the address of the Society of Jesus. They contrived to work upon mankind by the dextrous management of ordinary powers: you lost men by the mismanagement of great and uncom mon endowments.. From the time of Swift downwards, the remark of the superiour fitness of coarse-and ordinary minds to the plain operations of business, has been often repeated. In the House of Commons, which you ear ly chose for the field of your ambition, the same thing takes place : there is often a point below elo quence at which men must stand | But it was not only from the abstractions of philosophy or the refinements of learning that you disgusted your audience; it was often from an intemperance which philosophy should have restrained, from a grossness which learning should have corrected. In the course of the prosecution against Mr. Has tings, you trespassed equally against justice, humanity, and decorum. Surely, Sir, the moral and elegant systems in which you are so conversant, should have suggested the impropriety of that conduct which you and some of your brother managers adopted. Mr. Hastings stood before them a prisoner, under that protection which an obligation to silent sufferance should have afforded him with generous minds. His accusers were invested with a high character, the representatives of the Commons of Great Britain: the tribunal they addressed consisted (abstractly speaking) of every thing that was venera ble and august. Was that a place for rancour or scurrility, for ribaldry or railing? You, Sir, in particular, had the calm dignity to support of one who sought to assert the rights of mankind, to vindicate the honour of Englishmen. You came not there in the situation of some of your colleagues, to wipe away the impeachment of vice in themselves by the declamation of virtue; to obliterate the memory of dishonesty by eulogiums on honour, and to take from publick mischief and dissension that general chance of advantage which desperate incendiaries hope for amidst the conflagration they have raised. It may perhaps wound your peculiar and allowable pride, to be accused of as much want of taste as of compassion or propriety. You reversed the well-know compliment to Virgil, who was said "to toss about his dung with majesty ;" you borrowed her flowers from rhetorick, and, soiling them with ordure, threw them in the faces of your noble and venerable judicature, of your highbred and beautiful auditory. I leave out of this account all doubts of the justice of your charge, because I give you credit for a belief of its justice. Yet in doing so, I fear I must deduct as much from your penetration as I allow to your integrity. How else should it happen that the only objects of your persecution have been those who have successfully served their country; that your blind humanity should have championed itself in the cause of the cheats of St. Eustatia, and the blackguards of Bengal; against men who had saved the British possessions in both Indies from the ruin and disgrace which some of your friends had suffered to overwhelm them in other parts of the world? Moderate men, who know and value you, are astonished at the vehemence of your style, and the violence of your conduct in publick, when they compare it with that candour and that gentleness which conciliate so many friends to you in private. petulance undervalues the first, whos> profligacy ridicules the latter. In my respect for virtue, in my pride of letters, I cannot bear the advantage which, on this ground, the dissipated, the worthless, the ignorant have over you. Resume the place which nature, education, your own sentiments, and the sentiments of good men would assign you. Do not peevishly (as I have sometimes heard you propose) retire from that post in which you may still be useful to your country. We have not, amidst our recollection of some weak or censurable appearances, forgotten the merit of your better exertions. With the force of a scholar's style, with the richness of a poet's imagination, you have formerly, and may again correct the errours or expose the abuses of publick measures. Be but just to yourself, to your talents, to your fame. You have lived long enough to contention and cabal. I speak, Sir, with the sympathy of a coeval. The struggle for place, the bickerings of faction, are at no time very dignified occupations; but at our time of life, and to a man like you, they are particularly degrading; when against the paltry emoluments, or trifling distinctions of a few joyless years, they stake the happiness of present peace of mind, and the reputation of future ages. But it needs less metaphysical knowledge than you possess, less knowledge of life than my age has taught me, to account for this phenomenon. When the mind is imbued with a particular turn of thinking which it has indulged into a habit; with the audience that rouses, the exertion that warms, the party that inflames; against all these circumstances combined, it requires more soundness of judgment than men of your genius are commonly blessed with, to keep the just and even balance of conduct and demeanour : yet humanity should never leave us, because in a good man it is that instinctive principle which nothing should overpower for a moment. There was a time, Sir, when you forgot its call; a remarkable period, when distress and infirmity were seen in such elevated places, that the visitation of heaven was marked with national awe and depression. I forbear to recal the general indignation, or to raise the blush on your own cheek which a repetition of the expressions you then used must occasion. For this also you wanted the apology some others might have pleaded; you knew the tenderness of a parent, the comforts of a family, the connexion of a worthy and honourable society. You had not abandoned your heart to play, nor lived a wretched dependent on the prostitution of character, on the wreck of principle. But you had leased out your humanity to faction! Party-rage had stifled your natural sensibility, and you forgot the man in the monarch. Yet they who are willing to blame you will quote that parade of feeling which you detailed for the misfortunes of Asiatick princes, of whom the names and de-life-time, created earl of Middlesex scription threw a ridicule over the pomp of your pity. I will answer, since I have no better apology, that here also it was the rage of party still. The rage of party, Sir, is unworthy of your talents, and unbecoming your character. It levels your genius and your virtue with men whose BIOGRAPHY. BRUTUS. CHARLES, EARL OF DORSET. This nobleman, heir to the earldom of Dorset, was, in his father's and Baron Cranfield, upon the death of his uncle who bore those titles. Charles loved his wit, respected his talents, and admired the bravery he showed as a volunteer in the fleet. To be near the royal person he was of the bed-chamber, but he seldom came to court in James II's reign; and, in the midst of the confusions |