her son. She diffuses a sense of beauty, like summer-time. The reader never loses sight of Venus. Or, if she recede from the eye, the colouring bloom of her face and robe still flows along the narrative; as the sunshine, sinking behind thick trees for a moment, leaves the grass warm with its recent splendour.

AUGUST 2nd.-Amusement is the waking sleep of labour. When it absorbs thought, patience, and strength, that might have been seriously employed, it loses its distinctive character, and becomes the taskwork of idleness. For this reason, an elegant occupation of leisure hours may be very questionable to a Christian mind, keeping a debtor-and-creditor account of time. In any case, the opinions of the Bishop and Poet are worth hearing :—

CHESS.

BISHOP BEVEridge. Either 'tis a lottery or not. If it be a lottery, it is not lawful; because 'tis a great presumption and sin to set God at work to recreate ourselves. If it be not a lottery, then it is not a pure recreation; for if it depends on man's wit and study, it exercises his brain and spirits

CHESS.

WILLIAM Cowper. Who, then, that has a mind well strung and tuned To contemplation, and within his reach

A scene so friendly to his fav'rite taste,

Would waste attention on the chequer'd board,

His host of wooden warriors

to and fro

BEVERIDGE.

as if he was about other things. So that being on one side not lawful-on the other side no recreation, it can on no side be lawful.Private Thoughts.

COWPER.

Marching and countermarching, with an eye

As fix'd as marble, with a forehead ridg'd

And furrow'd into storms, and with a hand Trembling, as if eternity were hung

In balance on his conduct of a pin.

Task, B. i.

AUGUST 3rd.-If a student ever begin to plume himself on his reading in the week, let him take up a volume of Warburton, and learn to know his own poverty. The remedy will be pungent, but effectual. This remarkable man has been painted by four pencils-Bolingbroke, Johnson, Hurd, and Parr. The outline by Pope's friend is like a rough study in chalk for one of Rembrandt's heads::-"The man was communicative enough, but there was nothing distinct in his mind. ask him a question, was to wind up a spring in his memory that rolled in vast rapidity and with a confused noise, till the force of it was spent, and you went away with all the noise in your ears, stunned and uninformed."

To

The judgment of Johnson was not much milder:-" If I had written with hostility of Warburton in my Shakspere, I should have quoted this couplet:

Here Learning, blinded first and then beguiled,
Looked dark as Ignorance, as Fancy wild.

You see they'd have fitted him to a T." Dr. Adams." But you did not write against Warburton." Johnson." No, Sir; I treated him with great respect, both in my preface and notes."

Warburton regarded his contemporary's behaviour in a darker light. Hints of wounded authorship break out in his letters:-"The remarks he makes in every page on my commentaries are full of insolence and malignant reflections, &c." And, again, to Hurd:-"Of this Johnson, you and I, I believe, think pretty much alike."

The giants once met at the house of the Bishop of St. Asaph. Warburton looked on Johnson, at first, with some surliness; but after being jostled into conversation, they retired to a window, and in taking leave Warburton patted his companion. They ought to have taken to each other, having so many good and evil qualities in common. Both of humble parentage, and lifted over the crowd into comfort and fame; both despots, and reigning by terror; both impetuous and coarse; both familiar with broadest and narrowest paths of literature; Warburton knowing most of philosophy and Greek; Johnson

be

of poetry and polite learning. Neither was richly endowed with taste, whatever Pope might choose to affirm of his advocate. But Johnson, even with Lycidas scowling in his face, had the larger share. Warburton tumbled everything into his vast heaps of erudition. That flame of genius must have been strong which shot up through the rubbish and dust. And it did ascend. The fire is never stifled. The Legation may a paradox, but it blazes. The style, in the highest degree nervous and animated, abounds in sallies of mirth, happinesses of phrase, glowing outbursts of feeling, and curiosities of abuse. His sarcasm has the keenest edge. "The learned and judicious Mr. Huet, who, not content to seize as lawful prize all he meets with in the waste of fabulous times, makes cruel inroads into the cultivated ages of literature."(D. L., b. iii. sect. 6.)

I recollect an amusing anecdote of Warburton, in a letter of Mrs. Carter (1763) to Miss Talbot. The scene was a stage-coach between Deal and London:-"As Nancy might possibly give you a formidable account of my three fellow-travellers, I think it necessary to inform you that they did not eat me up; for which I was the more obliged to them, as they seemed disposed to eat everything else that came in their way. By

their discourse I believe they were pilots to the packet-boats. One of them, in great simplicity, gave a very concise account of one of his passengers. He said he had once carried over one Warburton, a very old orator,-you may read about him in the almanacks. He was a member of parliament then, but he has been made a bishop since. Poor Bishop Warburton, to have all his fame reduced to what one may read about him in the almanacks!"

AUGUST 4th.-A painter may sit before a glass and draw himself, but the mental portrait must be taken by other hands. Every man is his own deceiver. "I will not give the Algebraist sixpence for his encomiums on my Task, if he condemns my Homer, which I know in point of language is equal to it, and in variety of numbers superior." The self-love of Milton was not weaker than Cowper's. A preference of Paradise Lost to Regained, made him angry. When Johnson was requested to name the finest couplet he had ever written, he repeated the two most pompous verses in his works. Tasso was willing to let the Jerusalemme be estimated by its weakest stanza. The mistake of Milton and Cowper in a literary, other authors have made in a moral or personal sense.