ces were more silly than school-boys, were constantly lugging in the authority of Aristotle to support the tenets of Christianity; and yet these very men would laugh at an engineer of the present day, who should make a similar blunder in artillery, that they have done in argument, and drag up an ancient battering ram to assist a modern cannon.

There are many things that are thorns to our hopes until we have attained them, and envenomed arrows to our hearts, when we have.

The ancients, in their poetical and dramatical machinery, made their gods the prime agents of as much evil as good. They have described thern, as mixing themselves up with human infirmities, and lending themselves to human passions, in so gross a manner, that it is almost impossible to admire virtue, and to esteem such gods, or to look up to heaven with affection, without looking down upon its rulers with abhorrence.* It is on this

In confirmation of the above remarks, I shall quote a passage from one of the finest writers of the last century:'Be it how it will, the wonderful in poetry has begotten that of knight-errantry, and certain it is, that the devils and conjurers cause much less harm in this way of writing, than the gods and their ministers did in the former.

'The goddess of arts, of knowledge, and wisdom, inspires the bravest of all the Greeks with an ungovernable fury, and suffers him not to recover his senses she had taken from him, but only to make him capable of perceiving his folly, and by this means to kill himself out of mere shame and despair.

'The greatest and most prudent of the goddesses favours scandalous passions, and lends her assistance to carry on a criminal amour.

account that I should rather side with Plato, who would have interdicted the ancient tragedy to the Athenians, then with Aristotle, who with some qual.

"The same goddess employs all sorts of artifices to destroy a handful of innocent people, who by no means deserved her indignation.

"She thought it not enough to exhaust her own power, and that of the other gods, whom she solicited to ruin Eneas, but even corrupts the god of sleep to cast Palinu rus into a slumber, and so to order matters, that he might drop into the sea; this piece of treachery succeeded, and the poor pilot perished in the waves.

‹ There is not one of the gods in these poems that does not bring the greatest misfortunes upon men, or hurry them on to the blackest actions. Nothing is so villanous here below, which is not executed by their order, or authorized by their example; and this it was that principally contributed to give birth to the sect of the Epicureans, and afterwards to support it.

Epicurus, Lucretius, and Petronius, would rather make their gods lazy, and enjoy their immortal nature in an uninterrupted tranquillity, than see them active and cruelly employed in ruining ours.

Nay, Epicurus, by doing so, pretended he showed his great respect to the gods; and from hence proceeded that saying which Bacon so much admires, Non Deos vulgi negare profanum, sed vulgi opinionem diis applicare profanum..*

Now I don't mean by this, that we are obliged to discard the gods out of our works, and much less from those of poetry, where they seem to enter more naturally than any where else. A Jove principium musa.t I am for introducing them as much as any man, but then I would have them bring their wisdom, justice, and clemency along with them, and not appear, as we generally make them, like a pack of impostors and assassins. I would have them come with a conduct to regulate, and not with a disorder to confound every thing.

'Perhaps it may be replied, that these extravagances

"It is not profanity to deny the gods of the vulgar, but it is profanity to measure the gods by the opinions of the vulgar.-Pus

From Jove the muse descenda.-PUB

#fications, recommended it. For the writers of the Greek tragedy were continually placing their audi ence in situations where, if they exercised their pity, it could only be at the expense of their piety, and where disgust was a feeling far more liable to be excited than devotion. In short, there seems to be this difference between the superstition of the Pagans, and the religion of the Christians; the former lowered a God to a man; the latter exalts & man to a God!

On a former occasion I have observed, that every historian has described the age in which he happened to write, as the worst because he has only heard of the wickedness of other times, but has felt and seen that of his own. I now repeat this proposition for the purpose of introducing a very shrewd remark I have since chanced upon, which

ought only to pass for fables and fictions which belong to the jurisdiction of poetry. But I would fain know what att and science in the world has the power to exclude good sense? If we need only write in verse, to be privileged in all extravagances, for my part, I would never advise any man to meddle with prose, where he must immediately be pointed at for a coxcomb, if he leaves good sense and reason never so little behind him.

'I wonder extremely, that the ancient poets were so scrupulous to preserve probability in actions purely human, and violated it after so abominable a manner, when they come to recount the actions of the gods. Even those who have spoken of their nature more soberly than the rest, could not forbear to speak extravagantly of their conduct. 'When they establish their being, and their attributes, they make them immortal, infinite, almighty,perfectly wise, and perfectly good. But at the very moment they set them a working, there is no weakness to which they do not make them stoop; there is no folly or wickedness which they do not make them commit.'

will give rise to a few observations. "How strange it is, (says an old author,) that we, of the present day, are constantly praising that past age, which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.' This assertion is witty, and true; but if the praise and the censure awarded by the parties, were equally true, it would follow that the world must have become so bad by this time, that no security, and of course, no society could be found within it. For if every succeeding generation praises the past, but abuses the present, and is right in doing it, how very good must men have been in the first uges of the world, and how excessively bad must they have become now, On the former supposition, a deluge of water would not have been necessary, and on the latter, a deluge of fire would hardly effect a cure. But let us pause to inquire who they are, that are most commonly the great admirers of the olden time;' the laudatores temporis acti.* They are almost invariably to be found amongst the aged; and the rising generation, having no experience of their own, but trusting to those who have—hear, and believe. But is it not natural, that the old should extol the days of their youth; the weak, the era of their strength; the sick, the season of their vigour; and the disappointed, the spring-tide of their hopes! Alas, it is not the times that have changed, but themselves.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would in all probability have done for us. Life too often presents us with a

• Flatterers of the olden time--PUB

choice of evils, rather than of goods. Like the fallen angels of Milton, we all know the evils that we have, but we are ignorant what greater evils we might have encountered by rushing on apparent goods, the consequences of which we know not. • Evertere domus totas, optantibus ipsis

Dii faciles;'*

by which even a Pagan moralist suggests that the prayers of men are sometimes granted by the gods, to the destruction of the supplicants.

We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said, that a thing is not necessarily against reason, because it happens to be above it. Doctor B- -t once told Horne Tooke that he had just witnessed an exemplification of the Trinity, for he had seen three men in one whiskey! Poh, poh!' replied our etymologist, 'that is no exemplification at all; you should have seen one man in three whiskeys! A certain missionary once asked a new convert, if he had any clear notions on this sacred subject, his Asiatic proselyte immediately made three folds in his garment, and having held them in that state a few seconds, pulled them back again into one We believe the doctrine of the Trinity, because, though above reason, it is matter of faith; but we

* For sometimes heaven will aid the madly blind To pull upon themselves their own destruction.-PUB.

↑ This anecdote is rather against the doctor, for the wn Is Parson Horne's, but the profaneness is the doctor's; perhaps even I shall not wholly escape for relating it.