took the part of the lady of Saint Valori, and also spoke the epilogue. She played inimitably, and in those days, when only men and women trode the stage, the public were contented with what was perfect in nature, and of course admired and applauded Mrs. Siddons; they could then also see merit in Mr. Kemble, who was in the commencement of his career, and appeared in the character of the youthful Montgomeri: the audiences of that time did not think the worse of him because he had reached the age of manhood, and appeared before them in the full stature and complete maturity of one of the finest forms, that probably was ever exhibited upon a public stage. A revolution since then has taken place, a caprice, as ridiculous as it is extraordinary, and a general act of superannuation has gone forth against every male performer that has a beard. How I am to style this young child of fortune, this adopted favourite of the public, I don't rightly know; the bills of Covent-garden announce him as master Betty, those of Drury-lane as the Young Roscius. Roscius, as I believe upon the authority of Shakespeare, was an actor in Rome, and Cicero, who admired him, made a speech in his praise: all this of course is very right on both sides, and exactly as it should be. Mr. Harris announces him to the old women in the galleries in a phrase, that is familiar to them; whilst Mr. Sheridan, presenting him to the senators in the boxes by the style and title of Roscius, fails perhaps in his little representa tive of the great Roman actor, but perfectly succeeds in his own similitude to the eloquent Roman orator. In the mean time my friend Smith of Bury, with all that zeal for merit, which is natural to him, marries him to Melpomene with the ring of Garrick, and strewing roses of Parpassus on the nuptial couch, crowns happy master betty, alias young Roscius, with a never-fading chaplet of immortal verse And now when death dissolves his mortal frame, His soul shall mount to heav'n from whence it came; Earth keep his ashes, verse preverse his fame. How delicious to be praised and panegyrized in such a style! to be caressed by duke, and (which is better) by the daughters of dukes, flattered by wits, feasted by aldermen, stuck up in the windows of the printshops, and set astride (as these eyes have seen him) upon the cutwater of a privateer, like the tutelary genius of the British flag! What encouragements doth this great enlightened nation hold forth to merit! What a consolatory reflection must it be to the superannuated yellow admirals of the stage, that when they shall arrive at se cond childhood, they may still have a chance to arrive at honours second only to these! I declare I saw with surprise a man, who led about a bear to dance for the edification of the public, lose all his popularity in the street, where this exquisite gentleman has his lodging; the people ran to see him at the window, and left the bear and the bear-leader in a solitude. I saw this exquisite young gentleman, whilst I paced the streets on foot, waited to his morning's rehearsal in a vehicle, that to my vulgar optics seemed to wear upon its polished doors the ensign of a ducal crown; I looked to see if haply John Kemble were on the braces, or Cooke perchance behind the coach; I saw the lacquies at their post, but Glenalvon was not there: I found John Kemble sick at home; I said within myself, feed on, an epidemic nausea will take place. There are intervals in fevers; there are lucid moments in madness; even folly cannot keep possession of the mind for ever. It is very natural to encourage rising genius, it is highly commendable to foster its first shoots; we admire and caress a clever school-boy, but we should do very ill to turn his master out of his office and put him into it. If the theatres persist in their puerilities, they will find themselves very shortly in the predicament of an ingenious mechanic, whom I remember in my younger days, and whose story I will briefly relate, in hopes it may be a warning to them. This very ingenious artist, when Mr. Rich the Harlequin was the great dramatic author of his time, and wrote successfully for the stage, contrived and executed a most delicious serpent for one of those inimitable productions, in which Mr. Rich, justly disdaining the weak aid of language, had selected the classical fable (if I rightly recollect it) of Orpheus and Eurydice, and having conceived a very capital part for the serpent, was justly anxious to provide himself with a performer, who could support a character of that consequence with credit to himself and to his author. The event answered his most ardent hopes; nothing could be more perfect in his entrances and exits, nothing ever crawled across the stage with more accomplished sinuosity than this enchanting serpent; every soul was charmed with its performance; it twirled, and twisted, and wriggled itself about in so divine a manner, the whole world was ravished with the lovely snake: nobles and nonnobles, rich and poor, old and young, reps and demi-reps flocked to see it, and admire it. The artist, who had been the master of the movement, was intoxicated with his success; he turned his hands and head to nothing else but serpents: he made them of all sizes; they crawled about his shop as if he had been the chief snake catcher to the furies: the public curiosity was satisfied with one serpent, and he had nests of them yet unsold; his stock lay dead upon his hands, his trade was lost, and the man was ruined, bankrupt, and undone. Boswell. Under Mr. Dilly's roof the biographer of Johnson, and the pleasant tourist to Corsica and the Hebrides, passed many jovial, joyous hours; here he has located some of the liveliest scenes and most brilliant passages in his entertaining anecdotes of his friend Samuel Johnson, who yet lives and speaks in him. The book of Boswell is, ever as the year comes round, my winter evening's entertainment, I loved the man; he had great convivial powers, and an inexhaustible fund of good humour in society. Nobody could detail the spirit of a conversation in the true style and character of the parties more happily than my friend James Boswell, especially when his vivacity was excited, and his heart exhilirated by the circulation of the glass, and the grateful odour of a well-broiled lobster. Rogers. I can visit the justly admired author of The Pleasures of Memory, and find myself with a friend, who, together with the brightest genius, possesses elegance of manners, and excellence of heart. He tells me he remembers the day of our first meeting at Mr. Dilly's: I also remember it, and, though his modest unassuming nature held back and shrunk from all appearances of ostentation and display of talents, yet even then I take credit for discovering a promise of good things to come, and suspected him of holding secret commerce with the muse before the proof appeared in shape of one of the most beautiful and harmonious poems in our language. I do ROGERS. not say that he has not ornamented the age he lives in, though he were to stop where he is, but I hope he will not so totally deliver himself over to the Arts as to neglect the Muses; and I now publicly call upon Samuel Rogers to answer to his name, and stand forth in the title page of some future work that shall be in substance greater, in dignity of subject more sublime, and in purity of versification not less charming than his poem above-mentioned. Lord G. Germaine. The constitution of lord Sackville, long harassed by the painful visitation of that dreadful malady the stone, was decidedly giving way. There was in him so generous a repugnance against troubling his friends with any complaints, that it was from external evidence only, never from confession, that his sufferings could be guessed at. Attacks, that would have confined most people to their beds, never moved him from his habitual punctuality. It was curious, and probably in some men's eyes would from its extreme precision have appeared ridiculously minute and formal, yet in the movements of a domestic establishment so large as his, it had its uses and comforts, which his guests and family could not fail to partake of. As sure as the hand of the clock pointed to the half-hour after nine, neither a minute before nor a minute after, so sure did the good lord of the castle step into his breakfast room, accoutred at all points according to his own invariable costuma, with a complacent countenance, that prefaced his good-morning to each person there assembled; and now, whilst I recal these scenes to my remembrance, I feel gratified by the reflection, that I never passed a night beneath his roof, but that his morning's salutation met me at my post. He allowed an hour and a half for breakfast, and regularly at eleven took his morning's circuit on horseback at a foot's-pace, for his infirmity would not admit of any strong gestation; he had an old groom, who had grown grey in his service, that was his constant pilot upon these excursions, and his general custom was to make the tour of his cottages to reconnoitre the condition they were in, whether their roofs were in repair, their windows whole, and the gardens well cropped and neatly kept; all this it was their interest to be attentive to, for he bought the produce of their fruittrees, and I have heard him say with great satisfaction that he has paid thirty shillings in a season for strawpaid him one shilling annual rent berries only to a poor cottager, who for his tenement and garden; this let them to his labourers, and he was the constant rate, at which he his yearly audit, that they might made them pay it to his steward at gular tenants, and sit down at table feel themselves in the class of reto the good cheer provided for them on the audit day. out without preparing himself with He never rode coat pocket for the children of the a store of six-pences in his waistpoor, who opened gates and drew sing through the enclosures: these out sliding bars for him in his pasbarriers were well watched, and there was rarely any employment for a servant; but these six-pences for as he kept a charity school upon were not indiscriminately bestowed, his own endowment, he knew to whom he gave them, and generally held a short parley with the gate opener as he paid his toll for passing. Upon the very first or accident relief was instantly sent, report and they were put upon the sick list, of illness regularly visited, and constantly supplied with the best medicines administered upon the best advice. If the poor man lost his cow, or his pig, or his poultry, the loss was never made up in money, but in stock. It liveries of his own servants as conwas his custom to buy the cast-off stantly as the day of clothing came about, and these he distributed to the old and worn-out labourers, who turned out daily on the lawn and paddock in the Sackville livery to pick up boughs and sweep up leaves, and in short do just as much work as served to keep them wholesome and alive. To his religious duties this good man was not only regularly but respectfully attentive: on the Sunday morning he appeared in gala, as if he was dressed for a drawing-room; he marched out his whole family in grand cavalcadeto his parish church, leaving only a centinel to watch the fires at home, and mount guard upon the spits. His deportment in the house of prayer was exemplary, and more in character of times past than of time present; he had a way of standing up in sermon-time for the purpose of reviewing the congregation, and awing the idlers into decorum, that never failed to remind me of sir Roger de Coverley, at church: sometimes, when he has been struck with passages in the discourse, which he wished to point out to the audience as rules for moral practice worthy to be noticed, he would mark his approbation of them with such cheering nods and signals of assent to the preacher, as were often more than my muscles could withstand; but when, to the total overthrow of all gravity, in his zeal to encourage the efforts of a very young declaimer in the pulpit, I heard him cry out to the Reverend Mr. Henry Eatoff in the middle of his sermon-"Well done, Harry!" it was irresistible; suppression was out of my power: what made it more intolerably comic was, the unmoved sincerity of his manner, and his surprise to find that any thing had passed, that could provoke a laugh so out of time and place. He had nursed up with no small care and cost in each of his parish churches a corps of rustic psalmsingers, to whose performances he paid the greatest attention, rising up, and with his eyes directed to the singing gallery, marking time, which was not always rigidly adhered to; and once, when his ear, which was very correct, had been tortured by a tone more glaringly discordant, he set his mark upon the culprit by calling out to him by name, and loudly saying, "Out of tune, Tom Baker!"-Now this faulty musician Tom Baker happened to be his lordship's butcher, but then, in order to set names and trades upon a par, Tom Butcher was his lordship's baker: which I observed to him was much such a reconcilement of cross partners as my illustrious friend George Faulkner hit upon, when in his Dublin Journal he printed-"Erratum in our last: For his grace the duchess of Dorset read her grace the duke of Dorset." “Arundel” and “Henry.” My novel of Arundel in two volumes, was hastily put together whilst I was passing a few idle weeks at Brighthelmstone, where I had no books but such as a circulating novel-shop afforded. I dispatched that work so rapidly, sending it to the press by parcels, of which my first copy was the only one, that I really do not remember what moved me to the undertaking, nor how it came to pass that the cacoethes scribendi nugas first got hold of me. Be this as it may, I am not about to affect a modesty which I do not feel, or to seek a shelter from the sin of writing ill, by acknowledging the folly of writing rapidly, for I believe that Arundel has entertained as many readers, and gained as good a character in the world as most heroes of his description, not excepting the immaculate sir Charles Grandison, in whose company I have never found myself without being puzzled to decide, whether I am most edified by his morality, or disgusted by his pedantry. Arundel perhaps, of all the children which my brain has given birth to, had the least care and pains bestowed upon his education, yet he is a gentleman, and has been received as such in the first circles; for though he takes the wrong side of the question in his ar gument with Mortlake upon duel ARUNDEL AND HENRY. ling, yet there is hardly one to be found, who thinks with Mortlake, but would be shamed out of society, if he did not act with Arundel. In the character of the countess of G., I confess I have set virtue upon ice; she slips, but does not fall; and if I have endowed the young ladies with a degree of sensibility, that might have exposed them to danger, I flatter myself I have taken the proper means of rescuing them from it by marrying them respectively to the men of their hearts. The success, however, which by this novel I obtained without labour, determined me to write a second, on which I was resolved to bestow my utmost care and diligence. In this temper of mind I began to form to myself in idea what I conceived should be the model of a perfect no. vel; having, after much deliberation, settled and adjusted this to the best of my judgment, I decided for the novel in detail; rejecting the epistolary process, which I had pursued in Arundel, and also that in which the hero speaks throughout, and is his own biographer; though, in putting both these processes aside, I felt much more hesitation in the last-mentioned case than in the first. Having taken Fielding's admirable novel of Tom Jones as my pattern in point of detail, I resolved to copy it also in its distribution into chapters and books, and to prefix prefatory numbers to the latter, to the composition of which I address ed my best attention. In some of these I have taken occasion to submit those rules for the construction of a novel, which I flattered myself might be of use to future writers in that line, less experienced than my self. How far I have succeeded is not for me to say, but if I have failed, I am without excuse, for 1 had this work in hand two full years, and gave more polish and correction to the style, than ever I bestow. ed upon any of my published works before. The following few rules winch I laid down for my own guid ance, and strictly observed, I still persuade myself are such as ought to be observed by others. in a regular, uninterrupted progresI would have the story carried on sion of events, without those dull recitals, that call the attention off from what is going on, and compel it to look back, perhaps in the very crisis of curiosity, to circumstances antecedent to, and not always materially connected with, the history in hand. I am decidedly adverse to episodes and stories within stories, Tom Jones; and in general all expelike that of the Man of the Hill in dients of procrastination, which tricks to torture curiosity, are in come under the description of mere my opinion to be very sparingly resorted to, if not totally avoided. Casualties and broken bones, and faintings and high fevers, with ramblings of delirium and rhapsodies of nonsense, are perfectly contemptible. I think descriptive writing, properly so distinguished, is very apt to describe nothing, and that landscapes upon paper leave no picture in the mind, and only load the page with daubings, that in the author's fancy may be sketches after nature, but to the reader's eye offer nothing but confusion. professing itself to be the delineation A novel, of men and women as they are in nature, should in general confine itself to the relation of things probable, and though in skilful hands it barely possible, the seldomer it may be made to touch upon things risques those experiments, the better opinion I should form of the contriver's conduct: I do not think quotations ornament it, and poetry must be extremely good before I can allow it is of any use to it. In short there should be authorities in nature for every thing that is introduced, and the only case I can recollect in which the creator of the fictitious the biographer of the real man man may and ought to differ from is, that the former is bound to deal out his rewards to the virtuous and punishments to the vicious, whilst the latter has no choice but to ad |