have many of the virtues of a steward.

But the present time is unfavourable to the success of your exertion. Your pleasantry will not unbend the muscles of those plodding faces which are to be seen in Lombard-street, and the Stock-Exchange; and I will suggest a doubt whether it be worth your while to disturb your holiday festivity with the more serious and elaborate calculations of your Anti-Budget. The little hieroglyphick article at the end of your most favourite newspaper, will outweigh all the lengthened columns it devotes to your eloquence; while the 3 per cents at 80, the minister will smile at the comick powers of Mr. S— and the tragick predictions of Dr. Price.

BIOGRAPHY.

BRUTUS.

ARABELLA HUNT.

This lady was admired for her beauty, her fine voice, and exquisite skill on the lute, and for her exemplary conduct in the most trying situations. Queen Mary had so great an attachment to the amiable Arabella, that she retained her as an attendant; in which situation she amused her majesty's private hours in the concert, and often with such common and popular songs as "Cold and raw," once at the expense of Purcell's feelings. But Queen Anne did not particularly notice her, though she taught her musick. The nobility highly valued her, and she was received with respect in every company. Beautiful and engaging as she was, she had no silly conceited airs nor affectation, but complied with the wishes of the humble as readily as with those of the illustrious : in

deed, to oblige was a happiness not to be resisted by her; and she who possessed so many excellencies,

alone seemed unconscious of them. She often visited Mr. Rooth, of Epsom, who married the countess dowager of Donnegal, a lady who was particularly fond of musick. It is difficult to describe the power of so lovely a woman, with such uncommon virtues. He who saw and heard her, must be fascinated. "So excellent was her skill," says Mr. Granger," that she was listened to with silent raptures and tears of admiration." Congreve forgot the wise man's advice," Use not the company of a woman that is a singer, lest thou be taken with her allurements;" for he was entirely captivated. To her he addressed one of the finest of his poems. "You make," says he, “ every place alike heavenly, wherever ." It is therefore no wonder you are. he was, as he subscribes himself, her "Adorer." What pity, that she, who merited happiness so much, should have been married to one incapable of conferring it. This modest woman, wife to less than a man, died Dec. 26, 1705. Her devoted poet, on seeing her portrait by Kneller, wrote, in remembrance of the publick, and his own particular loss, the following lines, which are preserved upon the print:

"Were there on earth another voice like thine,

Another hand so blest with skill divine, The late afflicted world some hopes might have,

And harmony recall thee from the grave.”

EPITAPH.

Know thou, O stranger, to the fame
Of this much lov'd, much honour'd name!

(For none that knew him need be told)

A warmer heart death ne'er made cold.

Vol. V.

For The Port Folio. TRAVELS.

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 356.)
LETTER XXI.

My dear E

BEFORE we descend the Dole, cast your eyes on the chain of Jura, on those mountains, which overhang Geneva, and towards the Alps, and confess, that this scene of nature in its original sublimity, and of all that art and industry can execute, derives an additional degree of interest from the idea, founded on very obvious facts, that it has been covered in very remote times by some great mass of water. The attention of literary men in Europe has been extended to every object, connected with the history of the globe;

No. 24.

to the stony substances, in particular, which are almost everywhere to be found upon its surface, or in the bowels of the earth; to their natural and chymical properties, and to the manner in which they are found either aggregated or scattered; those objects, therefore, which, however they may be situated or formed, attract in Carolina and Virginia as little of our attention as the particles of dust, which float around us, are here, become the alphabet of a new language, the signs and characters of a new science, intimately connected with the origin of the globe we inhabit; nor is it unusual to hear people argue, with as much earnestness, and gravity upon this subject, as if they had been consulted at the creation; I do not, I am far indeed from carrying my pretensions to knowledge so far, but I am persuaded, that the works of the Creator would everywhere if they could be proper y investi

Y y

gated, be found arising out of secondary causes, and as much so in the formation of the Andes, as in the growth of a mushroom: the two most powerful instruments which have served as secondary causes have been fire and water: whether portions of the surface of the earth have sunk, so as to leave the original supporters of it in those places protruded in the shape of mountains, or whether a shifting magnetick centre of gravity has occasioned a sudden change of bed to the ocean, I do not even surmise, but we have every day, in various parts of the world, an evidence of what fire can effect, and upon how great a scale, and he must be blind and deaf, who denies his assent to the powerful operation of water in former times. If the structure of a mountain be in beds, one above another, nearly parallel, and generally horizontal, such as we might suppose deposited by water, when charged with heavy particles of various sorts; it is made to remain stationary for a time, if there are found sea-shells of various sorts ;* and fish either in parts or entire, and fragments of various sorts of stone, which have all the marks of having rolled over and rubbed against each other; if the portions of the mass, in which

It is-a singular circumstance that the

sea-shells found in the beds of mountains. are in no instance the same (except in the case of oyster shells) as those left by the sea on the nearest shore; in some instances they are unlike any now known to exist, but in general their resemblance is to shells of distant seas: the same observa.

tion is made on the various sorts of fossil fish; those discovered in the quarries of France or Switzerland appear, with very few exceptions, to be of the sort now existing on the coasts of Brazil, or in the Indian seas. The inference is, that the retreat of the sea has not been gradual but sudden, and that there have been great changes of climate.

these marine productions of various sorts of stones are contained, appear to have been formerly in a state of fluidity, a circumstance very easily ascertained, we may fairly and reasonably conclude, that the mountains so constituted, is formed from deposits made at different periods in the bosom of some great ocean, which has been since withdrawn; these secondary mountains, so called to distinguish them from the primeval mountains, or such as contain no marine deposits, consist generally of limestone, the primeval mountains are of granite, a substance in which various sorts of stone in portions infinitely small, are found united without any visible cement: these last may have been as islands before the others existed: but they must also at some remote period have been themselves formed by a species of chrystallization. Such ideas of progressive gradual creation may have the effect perhaps of removing the commencement of our globe too far back for your scrupulous faith; but you have only to suppose what I have heard a professour of divinity give as his opinion, that the era described by

Moses was not the commencement but the renewal of existence on a portion of the globe, after some great operation of nature, and that the several days were so many ages, and your faith is saved. Independently of the effect which a former ocean appears to have operated by the sediment it has gradually deposited, the influence of the water in its retreat seems also to have been very great; the whole bank of the river I walk upon every morning and evening and that of the opposite side, consists of a great variety of stones which appear to have been rolled smooth

and left sticking in the mud now also converted into stone: immense fragments of granite too from the primeval mountains are found in places and positions which bespeak some powerful cause: as to the stones, which, to the confusion of the learned, have fallen in different places, at least which are said to have fallen; whether they are from the moon, some volcano of which may have thrown them out of its sphere of attraction, or from a satellite of our globe, visible only at moments and then mistaken for a meteor, or produced in the upper regions of our atmosphere, is what I am far from pretending to say; I believe, however, if we are to yield to recent evidence in contradiction to the former experience of mankind, that they really have fallen.

I saw one of these stones the other day in the possession of Mr. Pictet, it was about the size of a large pear, and not altogether unlike one in form: the extremities were rounded by some unknown cause, as those of a body, exposed to a sufficient degree of heat might be, but it had by no means the appearance of having been rolled along with others; the component parts are the same, as those of some other strong substances, but they are differently aggregated; the portion of iron, which it contains to judge from experiments which have been made is more easily malleable, than iron ore is in other cases known to be; the ore, in this instance, must, therefore, have been exposed to a great degree of heat prior to its being 'incorporated with stone; had it been subsequently, the stone would have been vitrified. No person now doubts of their having fallen, but, we are as far as ever from being able to surmise how they

have been formed, and where they fell from.

The cabinets of Geneva contain a multitude of the marine remains which are found in the neighbouring mountains, that of Mr. Deluc in particular, where I lately saw a petrified fish, which had been brought from a quarry of stone in Piedmont, it is in the greatest state of preservation, and being of a dark colour reminded me of those fish we read of in the Arabian Nights Entertainments, where a female figure comes out of the wall and frightens the Sultan's cook almost out of his senses. The impression of leaves also is frequently found on the stone of quar ries amidst a variety of marine substances, but no discovery of human bones was ever made, and the probability is, that the deluge which sacred and prophane history agree in describing as so fatal to the human race, still covers the scene of its devastation: we will now leave the mountains, but before we settle ourselves in Geneva, I must give you some account of the last revolution in Switzerland, which I have barely alluded to in what I have said of the Vallais.

LETTER XXII.

In distinguishing the seat of the aristocratick and democratick Cantons on the map, you will perceive the propriety of Milton's epithet in speaking of liberty; the government of the former however, even by the confession of Miss Williams, rendered their subjects happy, or as she in her goodness expresses it, was too weak in general and too timid to hinder them from being so: the government had in many instances succeeded to the feodal rights of the duke of

Savoy, and to the tythes and other property of the Roman church, and of the seigneurs whom it had conquered, or bought out; but we may easily believe, that the subjects who were left in possession of the most valuable civil rights, who paid few or no taxes, who had arms in their hands, could not have much actual oppression to complain of. Of all the subject countries, the Pays de Vaud, which belonged chiefly to the Canton of Berne, has at all times attracted the greatest attention; it is thickly inhabited, cultivated to the utmost, and adorned by the hand of nature with almost profuse magnificence. If ever the requisites of happiness existed on earth, they were certainly to be found in this fine country, where peace and plenty, good air, agreeable prospects, literature and the charms of society were to be enjoyed, under the protection of a mild, paternal government. But man was not made for happiness. The gentlemen of the Pays de Vaud felt themselves worthy of a higher station in the political scale, they felt as the gentlemen of South Carolina did before the American revolution, that a degree of employment suited to their education, and of importance in proportion to their fortune, was still wanting, and the government of Berne, like that of England stood in the unamiable light of a parent, who keeps his children too long dependant upon his bounty, instead of providing for them handsomely in the world. At the conquest of this country nearly

years before, from the duke of Savoy, France it was pretended, had guarantied the privileges of the people, and though no one could say what those privileges were, or how they had been violated, it appeared to the Directory

a sufficient reason for interfering in the affairs of a country, where a spirit of dissatisfaction was supposed to have for sometime existed, and where it had of late been extremely promoted by the writings of a gentleman by the name of La Harpe, whose history reminds me of what is said of Dr. F after his appearance before the privy council: they were not insensible, at the same time, to what publick report said of the treasury of Berne; that accumulated wealth of hoarding ages seemed already in their grasp, and to have been placed there for the purpose of aiding them in their intended expedition to Egypt.

It is probable that the duke of Savoy when sovereign of the Pays de Vaud had from time to time assembled the states, and it is certain, that they have never been assembled since; but that Fribourg and Berne, having nothing to ask, should not have called them together for the only purpose which had ever given rise to their meeting in former times, or employed them when met, is not surprising, nor is it so, that those Cantons should have retained the abbey lands and other church property, which was confiscated at the reformation, and which ever since have stood in lieu of taxes. I can conceive, however, that the gentry, may, in addition to the causes of revolutionary ideas already mentioned, have been mortified at the airs of superiority assumed by the Bernes, and at the general right of hunting and fishing which they exercised, as a lord of the manor might in England: it was another mortifying circumstance that they could fill none but inferiour offices of a civil or military nature, and that a sort of court was to be paid to the bailiff or go