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However many books,

Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not

A spirit and a judgment, equal or superior,
(And what he brings, what need he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,

Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself;
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys

And trifles for choice matters worth a spunge,

As children gathering pebbles on the shore.

Paradise Regained, b. iv. l. 321.

Socrates.

It is related of this eminent Philosopher, that being asked why he was contented to live in so small a house, replied gravely, that, small as it was, he wished that he might be able to fill it with true friends. Alas! Socrates knew nothing, as he says himself, or Athens must have been a much less polite place than London; where a man of less character for sense or knowledge than Socrates was, may collect five hundred friends together in one evening; but perhaps Socrates would not have allowed them to be friends, but only acquaintances -Definitions are dangerous things.

Pagan Deities, and their Jesters.

It is agreed among scholars, that the ancients formed their gods according to the ideas which they entertained of the great folks (as we call them)

on earth. When they had peopled the celestial regions with lords of this description, they could not omit the companions who they saw were attendants on the palaces below. They therefore supplied these celestial synods with a " Merryman," under the name of Momus, whose place consisted in the offices of making their gods and goddesses merry. An English Poet describes these Merrymen, or modern terrestrial Momusses, by indignant queries,

Who'd be a crutch, to prop a rotten peer,
Or living pendant dangling at his ear?
Who'd be a glass with flattering grimace,
Still to reflect the temper of his face?
Or cushion when his heaviness may please,
To loll or thump it for his better ease?

Dr. Young's Love of Fame.

Doggrel Rhyme.

Though perhaps Butler has carried the liberty of making double rhymes in concluding a line to a great licence, yet Swift, Prior, and after them R. L. Lloyd, have improved the pleasure arising from their witty poems by managing, with more art, their rhymes with this double chime. Fasti. dious critics in poetry, like some of their brethren in the musical department, object to any pleasantry as incompatible with the serious character of their art; but let both these professors in arts (whose

principal merit consists in entertaining) recollect that grave subjects are not exclusively the province of poetry or music. A poet is no more confined to a grave-stone, than a musician is required to compose only dirges. It were indeed to be wished that those bards who write on such grave subjects,

"That teach the rustic moralist to die,"

should not raise our smiles, instead of our sympathy, in our meditations among the tombs.

Business.

The difficulty which attends on a plain honest man, in the transaction of public business, chiefly lies with the persons among whom he attempts to carry it on to its conclusion. Private interest is the first great impediment to its progress; the cunning which pervades the schemes of the interested; the unmanly deference paid to some leading persons; the love of talk, in some persons inordinate, and if in rich ones, not to be easily controlled; the frequent repetitions of meeting to no purpose, till at last fatigue and disgust drive the well-disposed man from such affairs altogether. We are reminded of the poet's lines on life's brevity,

"Oh! gentlemen, the time of life is short;

"To spend the shortness basely were too long.". Henry IV. act 5, scene 3.

The Scholar's Felicity.

*

Dr. Young, speaking of "Composition," remarks, "to men of letters it is not only a noble amusement, but a sweet refuge; it improves their parts, and promotes their peace; it opens a backdoor out of the bustle of this busy and idle world into a delicious garden of moral and intellectual fruits and flowers, the key of which is denied to the rest of mankind. When stung with idle anxieties, or teased with fruitless impertinence, or yawning over insipid diversions, then we see the blessings of a lettered recess." So sings an elegant poet

Such of the Muses are the able powers,

That since with them I spent the vacant hours,
I find nor hawk, nor hound, nor other thing,
Tournays nor revels, (pleasures for a king,)
Yield more delight.

Britannia's Pastorals, by W. Brown.

Modern Composition.

Shakespeare, to whom no discrimination of many-coloured life was wanting, has facetiously described the great beauty of modern composition The antithesis, " your reasonst at dinner have been sharp and sententious, pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without

* See his Conjectures on Original Composition.

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impudency, learned without opinion,* and strange without heresy." This praise of Holofernes the schoolmaster,' is put into the mouth of his admirer, 'Sir Nathaniel the curate.'-Love's Labour Lost.

Democrats.

Dr. S. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, with his usual knowledge of human characters and motives, well describes the temper of a democrat. Speaking of Akenside, he says, "Whether, when he resolved not to be a dissenting minister, he ceased to be a dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth, or degrading greatness, and of which the immediate tendency is innovation and anarchy, an inveterate eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care of what shall be established."

Lovers of Poetry.

Amongst the readers of the poets there are two sorts, one who loves the 'rhyme and reason" in Boileau and Pope; and the other is attached to the fairy kind of writing,' as Dryden calls it, and

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* Opiniativeness.

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