blemishes and imperfections in her humour on a more intimate acquaintance, which you never discovered or perhaps suspected. Here therefore discretion and good-nature are to show their strength; the first will hinder your thoughts from dwelling on what is disagreeable, the other will raise in you all the tenderness of compassion and humanity, and by degrees soften those very imperfections into beauties. Marriage enlarges the scene of our happiness and miseries. A marriage of love is pleasant; a marriage of interest easy; and a marriage where both meet happy. A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason, and, indeed, all the sweets of life. No thing is a greater mark of a degenerate and vicious age than the aversion and ridicule which is sometimes expressed for this state of life. It is, indeed, only happy in those who can look down with scorn or neglect on the impieties of the times, and tread the paths of life together, in a constant uniform course of virtue. For the Literary Magazine. LEARNED TRIFLING. GREAT men have sometimes been found as capable of trifling as foolish ones. The old maxim, Sapientes est desipere in loco, The wise may sometimes dare to play the fool, has been practically exemplified, on some occasions, by the wisest of mankind. Newton is said to have taken great pleasure in making a kitten run after the end of a whip which he trailed along the floor. Stillingfleet was a great amateur of jack-straws. Haller did not disdain, now and then, to seek recreation in a game of push-pin with his children; and to turn the dining-table into a field of battle, the glasses into fortified towns, the wine into rivers and lakes, and spoonfuls of salt into causeways and bridges, has been the favourite amusement of many a celebrated general. There is another species of trifling, in which we sometimes catch men of the greatest genius indulging themselves. It consists in playing with words, and losing them. selves in an endless maze of riddles, charades, and a thousand other lu soria, which the verbal anatomists have not provided with names. Every reader knows how much dean Swift and his friends delighted in this kind of amusement. Some of their effusions indeed are so mysterious and so extensive, that they could not fail to have cost them very considerable pains and labour.— There is something peculiarly agreeable in these exercises, be cause they require only resolution and perseverance to execute or explain them, and because they afford to the mind that which constitutes its true happiness, employment, without demanding of us any thing more than a little learning, and dispensing altogether with genius. The following sport of memory has been ascribed to Cowper, and is an amusing instance of the manner in which the gravest mind will sometimes unbend itself. It will appear still more singular and grotesque when we consider it as a dedication of his moral poems. To the Rev. John Newton. MY VERY DEAR FRIEND, I am going to send, what when you have read, you may scratch your head, and say, I suppose that nobody knows whether what I have got be verse or not; by the tone and the time, it ought to be rhyme; but if it be, did ever you see, of late or of yore, such a ditty before? Í have writ charity, not for popularity, but grave as I could, in hopes to do good; and if the reviewer should say, "To be sure the gentleman's muse wears methodist shoes; you may know by her pace, and talk about grace, that she and her bard have little regard for thẹ taste and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoydening play of the modern day; and though she assume a borrowed plume, and now and then wear a tittering air, 'tis only her plan to catch if she can the giddy and gay, as they go that way, by a production on a new construc tion: she has baited her trap, in hopes to snap all that may come with a sugar plumb." His opinion in this will not be amiss; 'tis what I intend my principal end. And if I succeed, and folks should read, till a few are brought to a serious thought, I shall think I am paid for all I have said, and all I have done, though I have run many a time after a rhyme, as far as from hence to the end of my sense, and by hook or crook write another book, if I live and am here another year. I have heard before of a room with a floor laid upon springs, and such like things, with so much art in every part, that when you went in you were forced to begin a minuet pace, with an air and a grace, swimming about, now in and now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of eight, without pipe or string, or any such thing; and now I have writ, in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and as you advance will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penn'd; which that you may do, ere madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave; and here you receive a bow profound down to the ground, from your humble me, W. C. For the Literary Magazine. NEW YORK. THE city of New York lies in N. lat. 40° 42′ 8′′; W. long. 74° 9′ 45"; at the confluence of the river Hudson and Long Island sound or the East river; and on the southern and narrow extremity of Manhattan Island, which is about fifteen miles in length, and from one to two in breadth. The site of the city, as it originally stood, was very irregular, being broken into hills and declivities, and indented with small rivu. lets or creeks, skirted with marsh. Many of the hills are levelled; but the marshy grounds, though covered with houses and pavement, are still low and moist. The city is about twenty-seven miles from the ocean, and is washed on both sides with water of great depth, whose current is very rapid, whose tide ebbs and flows, about six feet, and which is nearly as salt as that of the neighbouring sea. On both sides of the city considerable encroachments have been made on the water by artificial ground, the whole extent of which may be computed at not less than 132 acres. Of this, 90 acres lie along the East river, and 42 along the Hudson. The portion of it on the East river forms that part of the city where malignant fevers have always first become epidemic and chiefly prevailed. The wharves and docks are constructed of logs and loose stones. All the fresh water used by the inhabitants is procured from wells within the city, and is now become extremely impure. The population of New York may be estimated at about 80,000. For the Literary Magazine. I HAVE been very much amused with reading the Memoirs of Cumberland, a work lately published, and containing many valuable anecdotes of persons and books that have attracted much of the notice of the world. The author has not acquired much fame, except on account of a few popular comedies. Few writers, indeed, have been so voluminous, and at the same time have written so little that is likely to last longer than himself. He has been an epic, tragic, and comic poet; but his single epic, and his many tragedies, have been read by few, and by nobody twice; and only three or four, among a score or two of his comedies, are of sterling merit or durable reputation. The most interesting parts of these memoirs are those which relate to other people. When he speaks only of himself, he has little to say that is worth hearing for its own sake, and that little does not acquire much additional importance by any peculiar felicity in his mode of saying it. My readers will, I hope, find something new and something amusing in the following passages, extracted from this work. They will probably be found to contain all that is interesting in the volume. Doddington, Lord Melcombe. In the parish of Hammersmith lived Mr. Dodington, at a splendid villa, which, by the rule of contraries, he was pleased to call La Trappe, and his inmates and familiars the monks of the convent: these were Mr. Windham, his relation, whom he made his heir, sir William Breton, privy purse to the king, and Dr. Thompson, a physician out of practice; these gentlemen formed a very curious society of very opposite characters; in short, it was a trio consisting of a misanthrope, a courtier, and a quack. Mr. Glover, the author of Leonidas, was occasionally a visitor, but not an inmate, as those abovementioned. How a man of Doding ton's sort came to single out men of their sort, except Mr. Glover, is hard to say; but though his instruments were never in unison, he managed to make music out of them all. He could make and find amusement in contrasting the sullenness of a grumbletonian with the egregious vanity and self-conceit of an antiquated coxcomb; and as for the doctor, he was a jack-pudding ready to his hand at any time. He was understood to be Dodington's bodyphysician; but I believe he cared very little about his patient's health, and his patient cared still less about his prescriptions; and when, in his capacity of superintendant of his patron's dietetics, he cried out, one morning at breakfast, to have the muffins taken away, Dodington aptly enough cried out, at the same time, to the servant to take away the raggamuffin; and, truth to say, a more dirty animal than poor Thompson was never seen on the outside of a pig-stye; yet he had the plea of poverty and no passion for cold water. It is a short and pleasant mile from this villa to the parsonage house of Fulham, and Mr. Dodington having visited us with great po liteness, I became a frequent guest at La Trappe, and passed a good deal of my time with him there, in London also, and occasionally in Dorsetshire. He was certainly one of the most extraordinary men of his time; and as I had opportunities of contemplating his character in all its various points of view, I trust my readers will not regret that I have devoted some pages to the further delineation of it. In the summer I went to Eastbury, the seat of Mr. Dodington, in Dorsetshire. Lord Halifax, with his brother-in-law, colonel Johnstone, of the blues, paid a visit there, and the countess dowager of Stafford and old lady Hervey were resident with us the whole time. Our splendid host was excelled by no man in doing the honours of his house and table; to the ladies he had all the courtly and profound devotion of a Spaniard, with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchman towards the men. His mansion was magnificent, massy, and stretching out to a great extent of front, with an enormous portico of Doric columns, ascended by a stately flight of steps; there were turrets and wings that went I know not whither, though now they are levelled with the ground, and gone to more ignoble uses. Vanbrugh, who constructed this superb edifice, seemed to have had the plan of Blenheim in his thoughts, and the interior was as proud and splendid as the exterior was bold and imposing. All this was exactly in unison with the taste of its magnificent owner, who had gilt and furnished the apartments with a profusion of finery, that kept no terms with simplicity, and not always with elegance or harmony of style. What ever Mr. Dodington's revenue then was, he had the happy art of managing it with that regularity and œconomy, that I believe he made more display at less cost than any man in the kingdom but himself could have done. His town house in Pall Mall, his villa at Hammersmith, and the mansion above described, were such establishments as few nobles in the nation were possessed of. In either of these he was not to be approached but through a suite of apartments, and rarely seated but under painted ceilings and gilt entablatures. In his villa you were conducted through two rows of antique marble statues, ranged in a gallery floored with the rarest marbles, and enriched with columns of granite and lapis lazuli; his saloon was hung with the finest Gobelin tapestry, and he slept in a bed encanopied with peacock's feathers in the style of Mrs. Montague. When he passed from Pall Mall to La Trappe it was always in a coach, which I could suspect had been his ambassadorial equipage at Madrid, drawn by six fat unwieldy black horses, short docked, and of colossal dignity neither was he less characteristic in apparel than in equipage; he had a wardrobe loaded with rich and flaring suits, each in itself a load to the wearer, and of these I have no doubt but many were coeval with his embassy above-mentioned, and every birth-day had added to the stock. In doing this, he so contrived as never to put his old dresses out of countenance by any variations in the fashion of the new. In the mean time, his bulk and corpulency gave full display to a vast expanse and profusion of brocade and em VOL. VI. NO. XXXIV. broidery, and this, when set off with an enormous tye-periwig and deep laced ruffles, gave the picture of an ancient courtier in his gala habit, or Quin in his stage dress; nevertheless, it must be confessed this style, though out of date, was not out of character, but harmonized so well with the person of the wearer, that I remember when he made his first speech in the house of peers, as lord Melcombe, all the flashes of his wit, all the studied phrases and well-turned periods of his rhetoric, lost their effect, simply because the orator had laid aside his magisterial tye, and put on a modern bag wig, which was as much out of costume upon the broad expanse of his shoulders, as a cue would have been upon the robes of the lord chief justice. Having thus dilated more than perhaps I should have done upon this distinguished person's passion for magnificence and display, when I proceed to enquire into those principles of good taste, which should naturally have been the accompaniments and directors of that magnificence, I fear I must be compelled by truth to admit that in these he was deficient. Of pictures he seemed to take his estimate only by their cost; in fact he was not possessed of any; but I recollect his saying to me one day, in his great saloon at Eastbury, that if he had half a score pictures of a thousand pounds a-piece, he would gladly decorate his walls with them; in place of which, I am sorry to say, he had stuck up immense patches of gilt leather, shaped into bugle horns, upon hangings of rich crimson velvet, and round his state bed he displayed a carpeting of gold and silver embroidery, which too glaringly betrayed its derivation from coat, waistcoat, and breeches, by the testimony of pockets, button-holes, and loops, with other equally incontrovertible witnesses, subpoena'd from the tailor's shopboard. When he paid his court at St. James's to the present queen upon her nuptials, he approached to kiss her haud decked in an em broidered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and breeches, the latter of which, in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty, and broke loose from their moorings in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner. In the higher provinces of taste we may contemplate his character with more pleasure, for he had an ornamented fancy and a brilliant wit. He was an elegant Latin classic, and well versed in history, ancient and modern. His favourite prose writer was Tacitus, and I scarce ever surprised him in his hours of reading without finding that author upon his table before him. He understood him well, and descanted upon him very agreeably, and with much critical acumen. Mr. Dodington was in nothing more remarkable than in ready perspicuity and clear discernment of a subject thrown before him on a sudden; take his first thoughts then, and he would charm you; give him time to ponder and refine, you would perceive the spirit of his sentiments and the vigour of his genius evaporate by the process; for though his first view of the question would be a wide one, and clear withal, when he came to exercise the subtlety of his disquisitorial powers upon it, he would so ingeniously dissect and break it into fractions, that as an object, when looked upon too intently for a length of time, grows misty and confused, so would the question under his discussion, when the humour took him to be hypercritical. Hence it was that his impromptus in parliament were generally more admired than his studied speeches, and his first suggestions in the councils of his party better attended to than his prepared opinions. Being a man of humble birth, he seemed to have an innate respect for titles, and none bowed with more devotion to the robes and fasces of high rank and office. He was decidedly aristocratic: he paid his court to Walpole in panegyric poems, apologizing for his presumption by reminding him, that it was better to be pelted with roses than with rotten eggs: to Chesterfield, to Winnington, Pulteney, Fox, and the luminaries of his early time, he offered up the oblations of his genius, and incensed them with all the odours of his wit: in his latter days, and within the period of my acquaintance with him, the earl of Bute, in the plenitude of his power, was the god of his idolatry. That noble lord was himself too much a man of letters and a patron of the sciences to overlook a witty head, that bowed so low; he accordingly put a coronet upon it, which, like the barren sceptre in the hand of Macbeth, merely served as a ticket for the coronation procession, and having nothing else to leave to posterity in memory of its owner, left its mark upon the lid of his coffin. During my stay at Eastbury, we were visited by the late Mr. Henry Fox and Mr. alderman Beckford: the solid good sense of the former, and the dashing loquacity of the latter, formed a striking contrast between the characters of these gentlemen. To Mr. Fox our host paid all that courtly homage, which he so well knew how to time and where to apply; to Beckford he did not observe the same attentions, but in the happiest flow of his raillery and wit combated this intrepid talker with admirable effect. It was an interlude truly comic and amusing. Beckford, loud, voluble, self-sufficient, and galled by hits, which he could not parry, and probably did not expect, laid himself more and more open in the vehemence of his argument; Dodington, lolling in his chair in perfect apathy and selfcommand, dosing and even snoring at intervals, in his lethargic way, broke out, every now and then, into such gleams and flashes of wit and irony, as, by the contrast of his phlegm with the other's impetuosity, made his humour irresistible, and set the table in a roar. He was here upon his very strongest ground, for no man was better calculated to exemplify how true the observation is, |