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and his long life enabled him to years ago in the affair of the mas relate of different persons.

tership of the Charter-house. The speaker the other day sent for him

Extracts from the Bishop's Let- to dinner; he said he would not

ters to Hurd. Letter XX.

"Have you seen lord Halifax's book of Maxims. He was the ablest man of business in his time. You will not find the depth of Rochefoucault's, nor his malignity. License enough, as to religion. They are many of them very solid, and I persuade myself were made occasionally, as the affairs of those times occurred, while he was in business. And we lose half their worth by not knowing the occasions. Several of them are the commonest thoughts, or most ob. rious truths, prettily turned: some, still lower, pay us with the jingling of sound for sense.

"Bishop Berkeley, of Ireland, has published a thing of a very dif. ferent sort, but much in the same form, which he calls Queries, very well worth attending to by the Irish nation. He is indeed a great man, and the only visionary I ever knew that was..

"P. S. Pray did you feel either of these earthquakes? They have made Whiston ten times madder than ever. He went to an ale. house at Mile-end to see one, who, it was said, had predicted the earthquakes. The man told him it was true, and that he had it from an angel. Whiston rejected this as apocryphal. For he was well as sured that, if the favour of this secret was to be communicated to any one, it would be to himself. He is so enraged at Middleton, that he has just now quarrelled down right with the speaker for having spoke a good word for him many

come. His lady sent; he would not come. She went to him, and clambered up into his garret to ask him about the earthquake! He told her, Madam, you are a vir. tuous woman, you need not fear, none but the wicked will be de. stroyed. You will escape. I would not give the same promise to your husband.'- What will this poor nation come to! In the condition of troops between two fires; the madness of irreligion and the mad. ness of fanaticism."

Letter LX.

But, as I dare

"I agree with you, that our good friend is a little whimsical as a philosopher, or a poet, in his project of improving himself in men and manners; though, as a fine gentleman, extremely fashion. able in his scheme. say, this is a character he is above, tell him I would recommend to him a voyage now and then with me round the Park; of ten times more ease, and ten thousand times more profit, than making the grand tour; whether he chooses to con sider it in a philosophico-poetical, or in an ecclesiastico-politica light.

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soon arrive at Rosamond's-pond, long consecrated to disastrous love, and elegiac poetry. The Birdcage-walk, which you enter next, speaks its own influence, and inspires you with the gentle spirit of madrigal and sonnet. When we come to Duck-istund, we have a double chance for success, in the georgic or didactic poetry, as the governor of it, Stephen Duck, can both instruct our friend in the breed of his wild-fowl, and lend him of his genius to sing their ge

nerations.

"But now, in finishing our tour, we come to a place indeed, the seed-plot of Dettingen and Fonte. noy, the place of trumpets and ket. tle-drums, of horse and foot guards, the Parade. The place of heroes and demigods, the eternal source of the greater poetry, from whence springs that acmè of human things, an epic poem; to which our friend has consecrated all his happier hours.

"But suppose his visions for the bays be now changed for the bright er visions of the mitre, here still must be his circle; which on one side presents him with these august towers of St. James's, which, though neither seemly nor sublime, yet ornament that place where the ba. lances are preserved, which weigh out liberty and property to the nations all abroad: and on the other, with that sacred venerable dome of St. Peter, which, though its head rises and remains in the clouds, yet carries in its bowels the very flower and quintessence of ec clesiastical policy.

"This is enough for any one who only wants to study men for his use. But if our aspiring friend would go higher, and study human

nature in and for itself, he must take a much larger tour than that of Europe. He must go first and catch her undressed, nay quite naked, in North America and at the Cape of Good Hope. He may then examine how she appears crampt, contracted, and buttoned close up in the strait tunic of law and custom, as in China and Japan; or spread out, and enlarged above her common size, in the long and flowing robe of enthusiasm, amongst the Arabs and Saracens. Or lastly, as she flutters in the old rags of worn-out policy and civil government, and almost ready to run back, naked, to the deserts, as on the Mediterranean coast of Africa. These, tell him, are the grand scenes for the true philosopher, for the citizen of the world, to contemplate. The tour of Europe is like the entertainment that Piutarch speaks of, which Pompey's host of Epirus gave him. There were many dishes, and they had a seeming variety; but when he came to examine them narrowly, he found them all made out of one hog, and indeed nothing but pork differently disguised."

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the latter, we are kept incessantly alarmed by the blind rage of war. ring elements.

The relation of the captain of a vessel, to the Admiralty, as Mr. Yorke told me the story, has something very striking in it. He lay

off Lisbon on this fatal 1st of November, preparing to hoist sail for England. He looked towards the city in the morning, which gave the promise of a fine day, and saw that proud metropolis rise above the waves, flourishing in wealth and plenty, and founded on a rock that promised a poet's eternity, at least, to its grandeur. He looked au hour after, and saw the city in. volved in flames, and sinking in thunder. A sight more awful mortal eyes could not behold on this side the day of doom. And yet does not human pride make us miscalculate? A drunken beggar shall work as horrid a desolation with a kick of his foot against an ant-hill, as subterraneous air and fermented minerals to a populous city. And if we take in the universe of things rather with a philosophic than a religious eye, where is the difference in point of real importance between them? A difference there is, and a very sensible one, in the merit of the two societies. The little Troglodytes amass neither superfluous nor imaginary wealth; and consequently have neither drones nor rogues amongst them. In the confusion, we see, caused by such a desolation, we find, by their immediate care to repair and remedy the general mischief, that none abandons

himself to despair, and so stands not in need of Bedlams and coroners' inquests."

Of this extract, the second and third sentences prompt a very cu rious observation. The bishop has fairly let it escape him, that he sees no medium between a particular, a correcting as well as a sustain. ing providence, and absolute and hopeless materialism. Here he is at variance with his friend Pope, who, following lord Shaftesbury, held that God governed the world not by particular, or partial, but by general, laws, and that all things were for the best.

*

Letter CXLVII.

"November 29, 1760. Wilson, of Westminster, preaching "Nichols, Potter, and T. one after another, bedaubed the new king, who, as lord Mansfield tells me, expressed his offence publicly, by saying, that he came to chapel to hear the praises of God, and not his own."

Letter CXLVIII.

"I will tell you what (though perhaps I may have told it you before) I said in the drawingroom to a knot of courtiers, in the old king's time. One chanced to say he heard the king was not well. Hush, said colonel Robinson, it is not polite or decent to talk in this manner; the king is always well and in health; you are never to suppose that the diseases of his subjects ever approach his royal person. I perceive then, colonel, replied I, there is some difference between your master and mine.

Such a man as Warburton could scarcely have any great admiration of Pope, who was not a man of great learning or knowledge, or deference for his opipions; though, no doubt, he had a regard and esteem for him.

Mine was subject to all human in firmities, sin excepted: yours is subject to none, sin excepted."

Letter CLXXIX.

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· April, 1766. -Of politicks there is neither end nor measure, nor sense, nor honesty; so I shali say nothing. I preached my Propagation Sermon; and ten or a dozen bi shops dined with my lord mayor, a plain and (for this year at least) a munificent man. Whether I made them wiser than ordinary at Bow, I can't tell. I certainly made them merrier than ordinary at the Mansion-house; where we were magnificently treated. The lord mayor told me, the common council were much obliged to me, for that this was the first time he ever heard them prayed for.' I said, I considered them as a body who much needed the prayers of the church.' -But, if he told me in what I abounded, I told him in what I thought he was defective- that I was greatly disappointed to see no custard at table.' He said, that they had been so ridiculed for their custard, that none had ventured to make its appearance for many years.' I told him, I supposed that religion and custard went out of fashion together."

Among the various persons who incurred the dislike and provoked the animosity and wrath of bishop

Warburton, were the celebrated Dr. Leland and Dr. Jortin. These two very learned and worthy men, Dr. Hurd, in order to defend and gratify his patron, the bishop of Gloucester, attacked with extreme virulence in two publications, 1. An Address to the Rev. Dr. Jortin on the Delicacy of Friendship, first printed in 1755 2. A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Thomas Leland, Fellow of Trinity-college, Dublin; in which the Bishop of Gloucester's Idea of the Nature and Character, as delivered in his Lordship's Doctrine of Grace, is vindicated, &c. first printed in 1764.* But after the bishop died, Dr. Hurd, sup. pressed these pieces in the subsequent editions of his works. The servile adulation that runs through the whole of Hurd's letters to Warburton will not appear surprising to any one who is acquainted with this anecdote. The zeal of Hurd was most acceptable to the bishop.

"I will not tell you," says he, (in a letter to him, dated Prior. park, 1764,) how much you have obliged me in this correction of Leland. You never wrote any thing in your life in which your critical acumen and elegant manner more shone."

Of Dr. Hurd's letters in this collection there is only one that does him credit: and it certainly does not a little credit to his critical sagacity, at a time when Dr. Blair,

Dr. S. Parr, moved with indignation at the mean and truckling conduct of Dr. Hurd, by that time bishop of Worcester, who, now that his patron was dead, endeavoured to obliterate all remembrance of what he judged politically expedient at the time, but what he was very sensible could not do himself any honour, in 1789 republished these tracts by Hurd, together with two very ingenious pieces which the bishop of Worcester suppressed in his magnificent edition. of bishop Warburton's works. Dr. Parr, in a dedication of these republications, addressed by the editor to a learned critic, treats the bishop of Worcester with indignant severity. He lashes his lordship with rods of iron.

lord

lord Kaims, and all the Celtic part of Scotland, with many persons in England too, and more in France, maintained with a fond enthusiasm

the authenticity of Ossian.

Dr. Hurd is indeed well entitled to the praise of having been a good critic.

Letter CLIII.

they are continual, and clothed in very classical expression. Besides, no images, no sentiments, but what are matched in other writers, or may be accounted før from usages still subsisting, or well known from the story of other nations. In short, nothing but what the enlightened editor can well explain himself. Above all, what are we to think of a long epic poem, disposed, in form, into six books, with a be. ginning, middle, and end, and enlivened, in the classic taste, with episodes. I have episodes. Still this is nothing. What are we to think of a work of this length, preserved and handed down to us entire, by oral tradi. tion, for 1400 years, without a chasm, or so much as a various reading, I should rather say, speaking? Put all this together, and if Fingal be not a forgery, convict; all I have to say is, that the sophists have a fine time of it. They may write, and lie on, with perfect security. And yet has this prodigy of North Britain set the world a-gape. Mr. Gray believes in it; and without doubt this Scotsman may persuade us, by the same arts, that Fingal is an original poem, as another employed to prove that Milton was a plagiary. But let James Macpherson beware the consequence. Truth will out, they say, and then

"Thurcaston, Dec. 25, 1761. "Your lordship has furnished me with a good part of my winter's entertainment, I mean by the books you recommended to me. I have read the political memoirs of Abbé St. Pierre. I am much taken with the old man honest and sensible; full of his projects, and very fond of them; an immortal enemy to the glory of Louis XIVth, I suppose, in part, from the memory of his disgrace in the Academy, which no Frenchman could ever forget; in short, like our Burnet, of some importance to himself, and a great talker, These, I think, are the outlines of his character. I love him for his generous sentiments, which in a churchman of his communion are the more commend. able, and indeed make amends for the lay-bigotry of M. Crevier.

"I have by accident got a sight of this mighty Fingal. I believe I mentioned my suspicions of the Fragments: they are tenfold greater of this epic poem. To say nothing ́of the want of external evidence, or, which looks still worse, his shuffling over in such a manner the little evidence he pretends to give us, every page appears to me to afford internal evidence of forgery. His very citations of parallel passages bear against him. In poems of such rude antiquity, there might be some flashes of genius. But here

Qui Bavium non odit, amet tua carmina, Mævi."

The absolute authenticity of Os sian appears now to be generally, nay almost universally, given up. But not a little admiration is still due to the dexterity or art, and the vigorous imagination, of the SCHOOL. MASTER OF Badenoch.

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