it is in vain that we move in the atmosphere of wits and of schools; we bring away nothing that can remain sufficiently long by us to fortify our system with its nutritive virtues. There is, besides, a negative task of the intellect, which consists in the rejection of ideas that have been used, and subjects that have been exhausted; a task which implies an extensive acquaintance with the practice of literature, and the remembrance of every spot of preoccupied ground in the territory of genius.

So much for the memory. The reason and the understanding, as well as their joint production, the judgement, are more intimately interwoven with all the operations of taste; but their principal and peculiar services consists in correcting the reports of the senses, in simplifying and purifying our sentiments, and in supplying a standard from the average of our decisions, and from our observations of the general and genuine feelings of mankind, by which our enthusiasm may be restrained, and on which our liberties may be defined. As to produce arrangement and order in our ideas is the characteristic property of reason; so in exercising this faculty in the province of taste, we gather and condense all the ideas that are constituent of real excellence; and judgement in taste is nothing but a quicker execution of this office, resulting from practice, and a skill in applying to this mental standard, mentioned above, the objects which lie in our paths; so that we may now perceive whence arises that certain art which," as Cicero says, "is supplied from a foreign source, and claimed by philosophers as wholly belonging to their province; and which binds in a fast union, and under certain laws of arrangement, those loose principles which lie scattered through nature." By following,

and not forestalling, the feelings and sensations, judgement corrects our decisions, without repressing our ardours: the laws which it inscribes in the tablets of our minds, are of a generous and noble character; and, like those legal restraints imposed upon the press by our country's constitution, which leave it open for every humour to vent itself, while they reserve a power of subsequent cognizance, so it is not till after our first feelings have pronounced, and sufficient play has been given to the energies of our minds, that judgement interposes with its restraints and penalties, and demands an account of our motives and our meanings.

I am sorry to be obliged to draw towards a conclusion; yet I shall feel content, if what has been said can serve at all to convince my readers, that, by a right analysis of the human mind, they may come at a system of rules which will exactly coincide with the genuine unperverted sentiments of mankind: that this system of rules is a practical standard of taste, easy in its application, and generous in its restrictions: that the general approbation of a particular conjuncture is not a standard of taste, though the true standard be founded on general approbation, that is, on an observation of what has at all times been pleasing or displeasing to our uncorrupted feelings: that this standard results from a consideration of the general qualities of objects, and not of the particular accidental sensations which objects produce: that it enables us not only to determine what is excellent, but the degrees of excellence: that it enables us to determine what are the channels through which different objects convey pleasure to the mind: if the same, in what degree; if different, which is the most dignified: that it enables us to take in

all the causes which produce pleasure, and prevents our mistaking between those which are essential and those which are contributive: that, where there are saving and commendable parts of a work, from this view which it gives us of all the qualities of excellence, it prevents our pronouncing a general condemnation; a common fault of vulgar critics, who build on one merit, to the ruin of every other; and the source of that beggarly sentence pronounced by Voltaire on our immortal Shakspeare.

No. 78. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9.

"Α γὰρ αὐτὰ λυπηρῶς ὁρῶμεν, τούτων τὰς εἰκόνας τὰς μάλιστα ἠκριβωμένας, χαίρομεν θεωροῦντες.ΑΡΙΣΤ. περὶ Ποιητ. κεφ. δ.

We are delighted with accurate imitations even of those originals which give us pain in the contemplation.

THE other night, the conversation at the club turned principally upon the different styles of composition which the fashionable writers of the present moment have adopted with most success. A gentleman present, who is a little too loud against modern literature, but who supports his opinions with a great deal of sound and judicious reasoning on the subject, sent me, the next morning, two very ludicrous specimens, in imitation of a favourite historian and a favourite biographer; and as they are both by the same hand, I have copied them both for my Paper to-day.

Specimen of an intended History of England, by the Author of a History of the Decline of the Roman Empire, representing the Life of the illustrious Son of Waldron.

"Now went forth the spirit of plunder. The gigantic forms of depredation, which at this time sub

jected the persons and pockets of the metropolis to the hands and hangers of the marauder, naturally rivets our attention to the exploits of the son of Henry Waldron, in whom, under the wily alias of George Barrington, I darkly contemplate the father of that species of clandestine rapine which disjoins the inconveniences of robbery from its terrors, and consists in the insinuation of the finger or the hook into our personal coffers, and recovering them triumphant with the spoils of the insensible benefactor. This furtive assessment upon property does not, on a first view, appear worthy of the transcendant abilities of the freebooter of Kildare: but whatever underwent the touch of Midas became gold; and the transmuting intellect of Barrington invested with system and with science an art which had hitherto been regarded, by the more learned and more adventurous in the schools of Mercury, with contemptuous indifference, and was by them consigned to the noviciates of the lawless fraternity. Darting a keener glance into the occupation which was at once to dignify and to degrade his future day, this plunderer of the West was probably fired by those very discouragements which would have depressed a less towering altitude of genius; and discerned, through the shades of ignominy, a harvest of glory, in a proportion inverse to the fertility of the soil in which it was to be reared.

"Armed with such confidence and such ambition, now walked forth the adventurer of Ireland, sealing his ears to the syren solicitations of more honourable employs, and spurning with unhallowed contempt the proffered patronage of the pontiff of Leixlip, and the hope of histrionic eminence with which a successful appearance in the part of Jaffier had saluted his dawn. The metropolis of Hibernia was