earl of Chatham, or because he himself was personally acquainted with the present Mr. Pitt, Boswell became a zealous partizan of the young minister; whose popularity, alas! though then in its full and seemingly amaranthine bloom, has long since gone perhaps in quest of the maidenhead of Orlando Furioso's mistress. He even at one time wrote some few short political letters, by which he expected to stir up a mighty ferment among the good people of Scotland; but is it not said, that maggots will sometimes burrow in the snout of a sow, without exciting in the poor animal any sense of their presence? He had hopes that Mr. Pitt, with the generous gratitude of a youthful heart, would reward his services with a place or pension; but Mr. Pitt found it easier to put him off with a simple complimentary letter. Upon a subsequent occasion he ventured to offer himself a candidate for the representation of the county of Ayr in the house of commons: but other interests quickly threw him at a distance in the competition. I own I think it is to be regretted that he did not succeed; for he would per haps have proved a tolerably honest member of parliament; and his flights and his witticisms might have served to enliven many a dull debate. Scotland. The levities and the flowers of literature were forever tempting him to stray with truant steps from the thorny paths of law. The publication of his Hebudean Tour too, as I have been taught to believe, exhibiting him as the minute recorder and retailer of whatever careless conversations might have passed between persons of any eminence in his presence, excited among his acquaintance a general alarm, that tended at once to hurt, in some smail degree, his practice at the bar, and to exclude him from some of those social circles in which he had been before a familiar and welcome guest. His first ardour was gradually extinguished: he relinquished the hope of becoming more eminent in Westminster-hall, than he had been in the Parliament house, at Edinburgh. He saw, when it was too late, that the man who consumes in conviviality, and in the pursuit of witty and splendid society, those prime years of youth, in which our permanent habits are usually formed, must be content to forego those successes of avarice and ambition, which incessant and nerve-strung industry in the toils of study or business, is alone destined by Nature to command. He even resigned the office of Recorder of the city of Carlisle, and resolved henceforth to court only the praise of literature, of song-singing, and of colloquial sprightliness. He at length fixed his residence in London, and offered himself as a candidate for business at the English bar. His beginnings were here also not unpromising. By the favour of Lord Lonsdale he obtained the respectable appointment of Re corder of Carlisle. He attended the Judges, in pursuit of business, upon several of their circuits. He was sometimes retained to plead in a Scottish Appeal. But his habits of conviviality, his character for flighty gaiety, incompatible with eminence in business, the lateness of the time in his life at which he made the attempt, and perhaps, also, his want of perseverance, soon stopped him short in his career of juridical practice in England as before in It was extremely fortunate for the lovers of literary anecdote, and of the memory of Johnson, that he was driven to adopt this resolution. Much more had his feelings been gratified by the eager curiosity with which all the world bought and read his Hebudean Tour, than offended by the poetical raillery of Dr. Walcot, by the complaints of a violation of the ordinary mutual confidence of men in convivial intercourse, or by that ridicule which men, far weaker than himself, delighed to throw out against the vanity and the love of trifles, which that book betrayed. Having treasured up, with wonderful diligence, the better part of what had fallen from his late friend Johnson, in many of the conversations in which he had excited or listened to Johnson's wisdom and colloquial eloquence, from the commencement of their acquaintance to the period of his friend's death, he now undertook to compose a biographical account of that wise and good man, in which those treasured gleanings from his colloquial dictates should be carefully interwoven. This book was, with much care and pains, conducted through the press, presented to the public. Its composition delightfully soothed the author's mind, by calling up to him, in retrospective view, the associates, the amusements, the conversations of the prime years of his past life. By the public it was, at first sight, received with some measure of prejudice against it; for who could suppose that he who could, not make up a moderate octavo, without introducing into it, a number of trifles unworthy to be written or read, should have furnished out two copious quartos of the biography of a single man of letters, otherwise than by filling them with trifles to sense, in the proportion of a bag of chaff to a few grains of wheat? But every reader was soon pleasingly disappointed. This work was quickly found to exhibit an inimitably faithful picture of the mingled genius and weakness, of the virtues and the vices, the sound sense and the pedantry, the benignity and the passionate harshness, of the great and excellent, although not consummately perfect man, the train of whose life it endeavoured to unfold. It appeared to be filled with a rich store of his genuine dictates, so eloquent and wise, that they need hardly shun comparison with the most elaborate of those works which he himself published. Johnson was seen in it, not as a solitary figure, but associated with those groupes of his distinguished contemporaries with which it was his good fortune, in the latter and more illustrious years of his life, often to meet and to converse. It displayed many fine specimens of that proportion, in which, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, literature and philosophical wisdom were liable to be carelessly intermingled in the ordinary conversation of the best company in Britain. It preserved a thousand precious anecdotical memorials of the state of arts, manners, and policy among us during this period, such as must be invaluable to the philosophers and antiquarians of a future age. It gave in the most pleasing mode of institution, and in many different points of view, almost all the elementary practical principles both of taste and of moral science. It showed the colloquial tattle of Boswell, duly chastened by the grave and rounded eloquence of Johnson. It presented a collection of a number of the most elaborate of Johnson's smaller occasional compositions, which might otherwise, perhaps, have been entirely lost to future times. Shewing Boswell's skill in literary composition, his general acquaintance with learning and science, his knowledge of the manners, the fortunes, and the actuating principles of mankind, to have been greatly extended and improved, since the time when he wrote his Account of Corsica, it exalted the character of his talents in the estimation of the world; and was reckoned to be such a master-piece in its particular species, as perhaps the literature of no other nation, ancient or modern, could boast. It did not indeed present its author to the world in another light than as a genius of the second class; yet it seemed to rank him nearer to the first than to the third. This estimation of the character of Boswell's Life of Johnson, formed by the best critics soon after its publication, seems to have been since fully confirmed. I am well persuaded that not one, even of the most successful of his contemporaries at the Scottish bar, could have produced a work equally replete with charmingly amusive elegance and wisdom. The publication of this capital work was the last eminently-conspicuous event in Boswell's life. Mrs. Boswell, an amiable, accomplished, and prudent woman, had died about the time when he went to settle permanently in London. Some of his children had been cut off in early infancy; but two sons and three daughters still remained to him. Over their education he watched with a solicitude worthy of the tenderest and the most prudent of parents. Elegant accomplishments, virtuous principles, a taste for moderate, simple, and innocent pleasures, and for these only, were carnestly, and not unsuccessfully, endeavoured to be impressed, as lasting endowments and ornaments of their minds. To the necessary expense of his children's education, he is indeed said to have appropriated a very large proportion of his income, in the latter years of his life. With the principles of piety, his own mind was too habitually and deeply impressed, not to make him anxiously careful to instruct persons who were so dear to him, in the Christian faith, the consolations of which afford ever our best resource amidst all the sorrows of human life. I have been informed, that, with a tacit condemnation of his own plan of life, he was exceedingly desirous that his eldest son, a young man of very promising dispositions and talents, should, after studying the civil law at the Saxon University of Leipsic, qualify himself at Edinburgh for admission into the Scottish Faculty of Advocates, and after that, be content to spend his time quietly in his native country, without adventuring rashly into the perils of gay or ambitious life in England. In the last years of his life, Boswell still continued to frequent the societies in which he had been wont to delight. But death carried away, one after another, many of his dearest companions. The dividing paths of life parted him from others. The fickle multitude of VOL. I....NO. III. unattached acquaintance deserted him from time to time, for newer faces, and less familiar names. His jokes, his song, his sprightly effusions of wit and wisdom, were ready, but did not appear to possess upon all occasions, their wonted power of enlivening convivial joy. He found that fortune, professional connections, great expense, and the power of promoting or thwarting people's personal interests, are necessary to give, even to the most polished and lively conversational talents, the power of pleasing always. His fits of dejection be came more frequent, and of longer duration. Convivial society became continually more necessary to him, while his power of enchantment over it, continued to decline. Even the excitement of deep drinking in an evening, became often desirable, to raise his spirits above melancholy depression. Disease, the consequence of long habits of convivlal indulgence, prematurely broke the strength of his constitution. He died before he had yet advanced to the brink of old age, and left assuredly few men of worthier hearts, or more obliging manners, behind him. In an attempt to exhibit a summary of the qualities of Boswell's character, I should mark him as a genius of the second class. He had vivacity, but wanted vigour of imagination; his judgment was more quick than just; an unlucky passion for celebrity, made him run continually in quest of it, as the peasant-boy runs to find the treasure at the end of the rainbow, instead of earning it by that energetic diligence in business, or that toil of solitary study, which are necessarily to be paid as the prices of great and lasting reputation. He courted the acquaintance of eminence, as if genius, or the praise of it, were to be caught by a sort of contagion. He seems likewise to have thought genius to consist in some innate peculiarity of mind, and not rather to be formed by the happy natural and artificial cultivation of any intellect originally found, but not cast in any mysteriously peculiar mould. These two vulgar errors seem to have led him astray from his earliest youth. The fascination of a society, in which sensuality was enlivened and refined by wit, elegance, and literature, did the rest. He possessed, for a man of a liberal education and literary ardour, little knowledge, save what he picked up in conversation. His principles were derived from the authority of others, not from discerning investigation by himself. Hence ho was subject to whim, affectation, and caprice; but all of an amiable character. He was too fond of general society, to be the very best of domestic men. He was, in the sincerity of his belief, and the warm, but perhaps inconstant piety of his sentiments, a true Christian. He might have been more useful in the world; more amusing he could scarcely have been. REMARKABLE OCCURRENCES. THIS extraordinary event, which we briefly noticed in our paper of yesterday, happened on Sunday the 7th of October, at eight in the evening. The day had been previously very cloudy, and a continual rain had fallen, accompanied with squalls, which were not violent, until the sun had sunk beneath the horizon, when the sea appeared to be unusually agitated, and such darkness prevailed, that an object was not discernible at a yard distance. During this progress, every person remained within their houses, in secming security, and wholly unconscious of that approaching horror which was destined so shortly to sweep them from off the earth! The clock of the cathedral was striking eight, when an instantaneous storm of terrible lightning and thunder began; and the rain fell in such torrents, that all the cross streets of the eastern part of the city of Funchall, were suddenly filled with mud and water above the first floors of the houses, which was occasioned by its being impeded, in some measure, from its furious descent from the ravines of the mountains into the sea. At this shocking period, the stoutest heart felt appalled; nothing was to be heard but the din of ruin working in every direction: hundreds of huge stones, that had been torn from their quarries on the hills three miles above the town, were tumbling over each other in stupendous concussion, carrying with them, in conjunction with the deluge, churches, convents, streets, trees, bridges, battlements, and eight hundred human beings into the bottom of the deep. Whenever a flash of lightning penetrated the gloom, were seen mothers wading through the streets, up to their chins in water, holding their infants on their heads with one hand, and endeavouring to catch security with the other; while those who attempted to assist them, were frequently maimed or killed, by beams of timber or wine pipes, which floated around them; and the sea presented a scene not less awful, though less ruinous: most of the vessels lost their cables, anchors, and boats; and many of the seamen were washed overboard. The ships rolled, in some part or another, several fect beneath the water continually, and all the sailors who were there on that dismal night, whether Americans, English, or Portuguese, gave themselves up as lost men. Thus, in so short a space of time as a few minutes, were many hundred individuals carried to their eternal home, in the very plenitude of an apparent security; and several thousands reduced from affluence to poverty: and many of them, it is probable, in the indul gence of those imperfections which constitute our criminality or our folly, and sent to their account, "unblanched, unanointed, unnannealed." Ten thousand pipes of wine and brandy were destroyed, and the sea-shore was skirted on the ensuing morning with millions of fragments, among which the mourning survivors of the calamity were eagerly seeking for the dead remains of their relations or friends. Several days after, the air of Funchall became so putrescent, from the rotting bodies that were buried beneath the congregated mud and filth, that a pestilence was apprehended: but in consequence of burning tar and pitch, and other neutralizing combustibles, that Scourge was providentially avoided, It was remarkable that this deluge, in its course, swept away twenty-nine vine-yards that were situated on the south-west side of the city; and so decisive was the ruin, that it tore up all the trees by the roots, and bore away not only them, but all the cottages with their inhabitants, the ground, cattle and appurtenances, and left the .rocky basis as bare of vegetation as the cliffs of Norway. All this assemblage of objects were whirled into the Ribeira Brava, or Mad river, and ingulphed nearly the whole of the small town which bears the name. In this wreck of matter there was but one human creature saved, and that was an infant in a wooden cradle, which was lodged among some reeds on the side of the declivity, and when discovered, on the ensuing day, was in a profcund sleep this unconscious infant was saved, from its ignorance of fear, as it is in the nature of fear, to counteract its own desires. The small town of Machico, was likewise ruined by this singular tempest, and many lives were lost there also; which leads to a supposition, that the lamented event was occasioned by a water spout, that had burst against the side of the mountain, and discharged itself down the gullies, produced those afflictive and sudden disasters, that all feeling persons must deplore; and which, whenever recollected, should operate to remind us of our frailty and our responsibility, and make us live well, that we may die happily. This is admitted to have been the greatest civic evil that has happened since the earthquake of Lisbon, in 1754, and was the most tragical of its nature, that ever happened. Had the younger Pliny been on the spot, it would have been adequately detailed. The property destroyed, has been estimated at upwards of a million of pounds sterling. LITERARY INTELLIGENCE. We can promise the public another evidence of the rapid improvement in elegant typography in this country, from Mr. Bradford's edition of "the Letters of Junius, with Notes and Illustrations, Historical, Political, Biographical, and Critical, by Robert Heron, Esq." He purposes making it equal in all respects to the London edition, and promises to publish it in January. Mr. Samuel Lewis has drafted a Map of Louisiana from Spanish and French Maps, and compared with the account of that country, laid before congress by the President it is now in the hands of the engraver, and will be publised by Conrad, & Co. in February. Messrs. Birch and Small have published the fourth volume of the Domestic Encyclopædia, with additions by Dr. Mease. The same gentlemen have issued proposals for an edition of Gibbon's History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which, if they print with the same neatness and accuracy as they have Rusell's Ancient and Modern History, and Willich's Encyclopædia, will doubtless meet with the encouragement that the |