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sans ceremonie, into the thick of the battle, he is informed that Aganippe is not always a cold bath, to invigorate by a single plunge, but that it occasionally emasculates the swimmer, like the streamlet recorded in Ovid. All this, my dear Ambrose, is indubitably funny, and generally gives pleasure to the reader, in proportion as it gives pain to the poet, resembling (to borrow a simile from FIELDING) one of those punches in the stomach exchanged at a boxing match, which, though they give such exquisite delight to the spectator, are the source of little or no pleasure to the receiver. But when a man publishes a mathematical truth, telling the world that the three angles of a triangle, taken together, are equal to two right angles; or when he broaches an arithmetical truism, such, for instance, as that four multiplied by four, produces a greater quantity than when merely added to the same number; it might be supposed that calumny and declamation would be silent, and that ridicule, if awakened at all, would be employed, not in denying the truth of those assertions, but in laughing at the credulity of a writer, who should think it necessary to compose two octavo volumes, in proving such self-evident propositions. A late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, has found out, that a newly married couple, possessed of a small farm, may, in the course of five or six years, be blest with five or six children; and that, if the farm be only adequate to the support of the wedded pair, their offspring must either starve, or wander forth in quest of subsistence elsewhere. He then supposes the golden age, so confidently predicted by certain English philosophers, to have arrived, and the hitherto trackless wilderness to be parcelled out in farms of the above description, in which case the command of seeking a subsistence elsewhere, will be liable to this inconvenience, that there will be no subsistence elsewhere to be found. Thus circumstanced, the five or six little unfortunates will share the fate of Ugolino's bantlings. It cannot be denied, that it had been better not to have been born, than to die from want of food. The inference of the philosopher is this:the source of all the evil is the folly, not to say criminality, of marrying, without a fair chance of supporting a family.

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I have thus compressed into a few lines, the contents of two octavo volumes; and one would suppose that the position they aim at establishing, namely, the certain increase of expence incurred by an increasing family, and the certain limitation of means to meet that expence, are positions too palpable to be con

tradicted. "My Muse," says a lively dramatic writer, of the reign of Queen Anne, " produces me a play every year, and my wife a child; but I find the latter much more disposed to live than the former." To every man of a precarious income, I should deem this a secret well worth knowing; and yet (O the ingratitude of man!) were I to detail half the outcry that has been raised against this unfortunate late Fellow of Jesus College, I should pester you with letters, rivalling in length those of the voluminous RICHARDSON. He has been attacked in weekly publications, by apostates bearded and beardless; he is assailed by the cloudy anarchist, whose novels are dull philosophy, and whose philosophy is dull novelty; he is pounced upon by ravens, and condemned by revelations: grave divines who have theories, and grave matrons who have daughters to establish, join in anathemas against the profane intruder, who has thus dared to lift the sacred veil that covers the altar of Hymen!" What!" cry they, speaking all at once, "shall an ugly fellow, of one of the ugliest colleges in Cambridge, with feelings as sluggish as his own Cam, presume to controul the impulses of nature? Shall our daughters, whose complexions, natural or acquired, vie with the lily and the rose, be checked in their endeavours to engraft upon the marigold, and thrown back to wither, an incumbrance on their native stalk? Shall our dear boys, whom we are training up to wed an adjoining freehold, and for whom the pious founder of our new National Theatre has provided a tier of private boxes, to snatch them from the public contagion above and below, be taught presumptuously to look before they leap? Shall domestic happiness, which our own dear Mr. CowPER has called the only bliss that has survived the fall, be cut up by the roots, and the garden of Eden converted into a wilderness, by a sceptic, who presumes to judge and decide, where orthodox piety believes and trembles ?"-" Alas! ladies and gentlemen," replies the alarmed and modest author, "I pretend not to judge and decide. To decide and judge are doughty attributes, and I leave them to my opponents. I am not the manufacturer of the systein, I aim only at being its expounder. When they who so loudly talk of the duty of entering into the marriage-state, prove to me that their own marriages were contracted from that motive, and that a new beauty or an old heiress was not the primum mobile that introduced them to Hymen, I will bow my head in silence. At present, I have merely to repeat in my appendix, what I have as

serted in the body of my work-Eating and drinking are necessaries, but marriage is a luxury; a refined and a laudable one, I allow, but still a luxury, and as such, not to be encountered without a reasonable chance of ability to support it." The mildness of the reply is vain-the outcry is renewed, and by a consequence as old as the days of Socrates, his motives are arraigned, because his arguments are unanswerable.

Such, Ambrose, is the philosopher, and such are his antagogonists. Every bob-wigg'd citizen who, as president at a public meeting, strings a bead-roll of silly and disaffected propositions, is thanked for his able and impartial conduct in the chair; but when a grave mathematician expends his nightly oil in enlightening the public, and shews that abstinence from marriage is a more desirable check to population than vice or misery, he is called a prodigal, a misanthrope, a deist, and fifty hard names beside. The British public is like a sick child. It is not enough that the medicine you proffer be conducive to its health, it must also be agreeable to its palate, otherwise you stand a very excellent chance of having the contents of the chalice thrown back into your own face. For my part, had I twenty times the talents of the late Fellow of Jesus, I feel too little regard for my species to employ them unsolicited in their behalf. No, my motto is "Qui vult decipi, decipiatur." Before I would turn oculist to such a race of moles, I would let them grope their own way through mud and mire, like the merchant Abudah, in the Mountains of Tasgi.

A MIRACLE EXPLAINED.

NOTHING is more sought after than novelty, and I am happy to have it in my power to oblige many great readers in this particular, by a quotation from the Bible!

Joshua, in chap. x. ver. 12, “said, in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thoustill upon Gibeon; and thoumoon, in the valley of Ajalon." This passage is cited for the purpose of subjoining a late ingenious comment on it from the pen of the Rev. Stephen Weston. The above is, says he, in the Hebrew, Sun, be thou silent on Gibeon, and

thou, moon, &c. Dum sile, Zama. Aquila.Пavcov, cease to shine, in the heavenly bodies, is non-appearance, or absence. Lune silentis dies est interlunium. Plin, lib. xvi. c. 74. Per amica silentia luna, is in the dark, Virgil, when the Greeks sailed unobserved to Troy, "silentem lunam," minimè tum lucentem, Politian. in locum. See also Deborah's song, where the stars fought against Sisera, by not lending their light, and his army was driven into the brook Kishon in the dark. Dante says

Mi ripingeva là, dove 'l sol tace.

Did Dante Inferno, c. 1.

These authorities shew that the original word might have been rendered literally, and not so as to make a miracle necessary.

sun was

It is evident, moreover, that the prolongation of light was not the object of Joshua's injunction to the sun, because he adds the moon, which could have been of no use, whilst the above the horizon. The prayer was made to the Lord, and the command given probably to enable the army of Joshua to fight a whole day in a hot country, at the summer solstice, which would have been perhaps impracticable under a meridian sun. Standing, and not hastening to go down, are expressions intelligible enough, of objects whose motion is not perceivable, when obscured by a cloudy atmosphere.

**

MEMOIRS OF HENRY KIRKE WHITE.

[Concluded from P. 231, Vol. III.}

I

TO THE EDITOR OF THE MONTHLY MIRROR.

HAVE too long delayed the conclusion of this memoir. Many avocations, and many cares, are an inadequate apology.

The simple fact is, I could not frame it to my mind; and whatever time I might take, I feel that I cannot.

A critique on the poems of a youth of such original genius, would be nothing in any degree adequate to the object, unless minutely detailed. It might then, indeed, be importantly subservient not only to poetical criticism, but the history of the human mind.

As it is, I must content myself with some few remarks. At the same time I am far from thinking it is dictating unbecomingly to the judgment of the reader, to accompany such compositions, and especially those of a deceased poet, with a regular critique on their merits. I think an editor has as good a right to do this with his name, as reviewers without their name. And many will wish with me, that Mr. Southey, who has so well executed the other offices of an editor, had done this also.

One thing will strike, that although he had read much, very much, and of the best and most striking authors, he appears rather to have imbibed the general spirit than to imitate any particular manner, except in a very few instances.

Without affectation or restraint, he is original in manner.

In several of his poems he is also original in design and conception. The drama of the Consumptive is a most remarkable instance of this. There is a playful facility, a glow and vivacity of fancy, an originality of thought, sentiment, and expression, which adds to the pathos, and the awful effect of this very singu lar production. This happy union of the most widely different fox talents, struck me as having more similitude to the genius of Shakspeare, as unfettered as his was by imitation, than to that of any other writer. I have observed that an able critic, in one of the periodical publications, has expressed a sentiment similar to that which occurred to me on the reading of it.

I had wished some more particular information of his studies, while at St. John's. I was also of the University of Cambridge, I was of Peter-House. I wrote to his tutor. I wrote to another gentleman, a friend of Mr. KIRKE WHITE, and this latter had written to me on his death; requesting some points of information, easy to have been given, and expressing how much I should be obliged for any farther communications, which might enable me to do some degree of justice to his memory. In similar circumstances, I would have done, at the request of any stranger, all, and more than all that I asked. And I presume, although I have so long left it, I am not quite a stranger to that University; and that neither as a scholar, or as a man, I have so conducted myself as to disentitle such a request to some success. However, it had

none.

What materials I had that seemed applicable to the Monthly Mirror, I have used, both by quotation and remarks, as best I

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