cently polluted with royal blood. The horror which he felt was soon increased by the appearance of the eunuch, Eusebius, who, with the assistance of a notary and a tribune, proceeded to interrogate him concerning the administration of the East. The Cæsar sunk under the weight of shame and guilt, confessed all the criminal actions, and all the treasonable designs with which he was charged, and by imputing them to the advice of his wife, exasperated the indignation of Constantius, who received with partial prejudice the minutes of the examination. The Emperor was easily convinced that his own safety was incompatible with the life of his cousin: the sentence of death was signed, dispatched, and executed; and the nephew of Constantine, with his hands behind his back, was beheaded in prison like the vilest malefactor." LOVE AND ITS CURE. Cur aliquis laqueo collum nodatus amator, Ovid. THE KE seat of love is doubtful.—The ancients place it in the liver, the moderns in the eye and the heart. It seems, however, to be. merely a disease, which has its principal source, like many others, in idleness*. A learned Frenchman has said, that it affects the body like a fever; and he adds, that this opinion is not simply a supposition, but founded in experience. A person of high fashion and well known character, who had contracted a most ardent attachment to a lady of great merit and accomplishments, was obliged to leave his country and join his regiment abroad. His affection, during his absence, was kept alive by a warm and constant course of correspondence with his mistress; till, at the end of the campaign, a most dangerous illness threatened him with death. In process of time he recovered his former state of health, but no longer retained the passion he had so long nourished in his bosom. The violent regimen, which his disorder had compelled him to use, had, without his being conscious of the change in his mind, totally eradicated the affection to his Otia sito!les, perière Cupidinis arcus. mistress. He paid the lady a visit immediately on his return to his country, and found, to his surprise, her conversation indifferent to him, and her person uninteresting *. Recipe to cure love.-Shave your head, catharticize, and bleed, and the business is done. Probatum est. JAQUES. N. B. Those ladies who are fortunate enough to inspire the tender passion in Apothecaries, are safe-never taking physic, they never can be cured; but they are dangerous people to approach, for medicine, like the Pelean spear, can wound, it seems, as well "I'm bewitched with the rogue's company," says Falstaff; "If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hang'd-it could not be else; I have drunk medicines.” 1 Henry IV. Act 2. Sc. 3. cure. THE FORMS OF LAW. "Our laws should be revised and re-compiled; which is such a work, that his Majesty (James I.) cannot undertake one more politic, honourable or beneficial to his subjects: for this continued heaping up of laws, without digesting them, makes but a chaos of confusion, and often turns the laws into snares for the people." Lord Bacon. THE HE forms of law are most unnecessarily complicated and verbose; the fining and refining the law, to use an expression of my Lord COKE, have operated like the responsa prudentum of the Roman law, and rendered them a dead letter to the bulk of mankind-the common consequence of suffering the accumulating opinions of lawyers to acquire the sanction of laws †. It were better, surely, to imitate the example of a great Northern Po * M. Huet. It is true that this is not the case in England, where, exclusive of one or two Commentators, the Statutes, and approved Books of Reports, are the only books of authority; but as the Statutes, as well as the Reports, are so numerous, and in many cases so obscure and so contradictory, that without the assistance of arranged collections, it would be absolutely impossible for any man, however great his talents and industry, in the course of a whole life of laborious study, to acquire any thing like 2 competent knowledge of the law. tentate, by forming an entire new code; or, at least, a Committee should be appointed to revise and reform them. Other sciences have been referred to the severest scrutiny of reason, and why should not this moral luminary gain admission into the recesses of jurisprudence? The witty author of the World says truly of the Statutes, that they are what all must obey, yet what few are informed of: like the Sphinx of antiquity, they speak in enigmas, yet devour the unhappy wretches that cannot comprehend them. Almost every act of parliament requires another to explain it, and no sooner is an act passed, than it becomes a subject of controversy, and is brought into the Courts to be expounded; in fact, the Laws of England are not possible to be known, so that society stands in the same predicament with respect to them, as they would under the operation of an ex post facto law; they are not even promulgated, but only printed by the King's printer, in the old gothic character, and sold at a high price, which added to their bulk, renders it impossible for one in a thousand to purchase them, and, as it were, to prevent any knowledge of them through the medium of a public paper, every newspaper is stamped with a heavy duty, and an act of parliament made to prevent persons lending them to read, under a penalty of fifty pounds. To those who object against amendment and reform, it is answered-a system, that is never to be censured, will never be improved; if nothing is ever found fault with, nothing will ever be amended; a resolution to justify every thing at any rate, and to diapprove of nothing, is a resolution, which, pursued in future, must stand as an effectual bar to all the additional happiness of which we are capable, and pursued hitherto, would have robbed us of that share of happiness we enjoy already.-Whatever now is establishment, was once innovation. Every medicine (says Lord Bacon) is an innovation, and he that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils, for Time is the great innovator, and time of course alters things for the worse, and if wisdom and council may not re-alter them for the better, what must be the end? * See a Fragment on Government. So Horace: Si tam Græcis novitas invisa fuisset, Quam nobis, quid nunc esset vetus ? TAPER WAISTS. & OUR ladies have borrowed the shape of the Greeks, as well as their dress-our gentlemen only the former. Never was there such a screwing age-to be bigger round than a nine-pin is hideous. Now for the authority. Weston, on the word Girdle, says, a girdle was necessary to a loose dress, such as the eastern nations still wear. This expression, and allusions to it, occur often in the Bible, and in the Greek writers. It was forbid to be fat or have large bellies, and those young men who exceeded the size of the belt were fined: Zwins melgov neolai. See Strabo, of the Celtic nations, who aped the manners of the Thus our own Poet, Greeks, lib. 4. He cannot buckle his distemper'd cause Within the belt of rule. Macbeth." This belt of rule is to many a pursy miss and tubby youth of our day, the very bed of Procrustes. Mr. Weston says, that the Greeks" who exceeded the size of the belt were fined," by which I do not suppose we are to understand mulct, but, by compressing stays, reduced, made elegant. See the Dictionary, to fine. JAQUES. THE STRANGER IN IRELAND. THE Author of MY POCKET BOOK has omitted to notice a blunder in the STRANGER IN IRELAND. The Knight, in commenting on the couplet "From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow, And Swift expires, a driveller and a show—” thinks fit to rob JOHNSON and bestow it on POPE, who could know very little of the mode of his friend SWIFT's expiration, inasmuch as he died five months before him!! Pope on the 30th of May, 1744. Swift at the end of October, 1744. S. Books, such as are worthy the name of Books, ought to have no Patrons but Truth and Reason. Bacon, of the Advancement of Learning, Book 1. Gertrude of Wyoming; a Pensylvanian Tale and other Poems. By Thomas Campbell, Author of the Pleasures of Hope, &c. 4to. pp. 134. Longman and Co. 1809. THE ancient father of fable tells us, that the prolific fox once rated the lioness for not producing more than one offspring.It is true, replied the royal beast, I produce only one, but that one is a lion! We feared that the author of The Pleasures of Hope intended to make himself liable to a similar complaint, and we feared it the more, because we knew that he could with truth have availed himself of the same reply-έvα, aλλα λeovlα. Our apprehensions are, however, happily removed; and to those who, knowing that Mr. Campbell's life is exclusively devoted to study, may say, "Is it worth taking so much pains, to leave no memorial but a few poems?" we may offer the sufficient reasons which were given by Dr. Anderson, in his Life of Gray-Change the name from Gray to Campbell, and few will be found to challenge the judgment of the Critic. "Whoever writes but as correctly as he has written, will not find himself able to write much. His pieces have all the marks of close study and patient revision, and the smallness of their number, compared with the length of time he was known as a poet, sufficiently shews that they were kept long under his own eyes, before they were submitted to those of the public. They may, therefore, be regarded as a kind of standard of the correctness to which English poetry has arrived in our day.” The principal poem in the present volume, is Gertrude of Wyoming, which is written in the difficult stanza of Spencer's Fairy Queen. To detect faults, is said to be an easy and worthless task, while it is the better, as it is certainly, in common cases, the more The Rev. Mr. Temple on the character of Gray. |