attempts to find his way through the fluctuations | ments and tender officiousness; and therefore of uncertainty, and the conflicts of contradiction. no one should think it unnecessary to learn those But when nothing more is required, than to pursue a path already beaten, and to trample obstacles which others have demolished, why should any man so much distrust his own intellect as to imagine himself unequal to the attempt? It were to be wished that they who devote their lives to study would at once believe nothing too great for their attainment, and consider nothing as too little for their regard; that they would extend their notice alike to science and to life, and unite some knowledge of the present world to their acquaintance with past ages and remote events. per Nothing has so much exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule, as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves.Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools, as giving the last fection to human abilities, are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary forms of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education, which they find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind. Books, says Bacon, can never teach the use of books. The student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice, and accommodate his knowledge to the purposes of life. It is too common for those who have been bred to scholastic professions, and passed much of their time in academies where nothing but learning confers honours, to disregard every other qualification, and to imagine that they shall find mankind ready to pay homage to their knowledge, and to crowd about them for instruction.They therefore step out from their cells into the open world with all the confidence of authority and dignity of importance; they look round about them at once with ignorance and scorn on a race of beings to whom they are equally unknown and equally contemptible, but whose manners they must imitate, and with whose opinions they must comply, if they desire to pass their time happily among them. To lessen that disdain with which scholars are inclined to look on the coataon business of the world, and the unwillingness with which they condescend to learn what is not to be found in any system of philosophy, it may be necessary to consider that, though admiration is excited by abstruse researches and remote discoveries, yet pleasure is not given, nor affection conciliated, but by softer accomplishments, and qualities more easily communicable to those about us. I that can only converse upon questions, about which only a small part of inankind has knowledge sufficient to make them curious, must lose his days in unsocial silence, and live in the crowd of life without a companion. He that can only be useful on great occasions, may die without exerting his abilities, and stand a helpless spectator of a thousand vexations which fret away happiness, and which nothing is required to remove but a little dexterity of conduct and readiness of expedients. No degree of knowledge attainable by man is able to set him above the want of hourly assistance, or to extinguish the desire of fond endear arts by which friendship may be gained. Kindness is preserved by a constant reciprocation of benefits or interchange of pleasures; but such benefits only can be bestowed, as others are capable to receive, and such pleasures only imparted, as others are qualified to enjoy. By this descent from the pinnacles of art no honour will be lost; for the condescensions of learning are always overpaid by gratitude. An elevated genius employed in little things, appears, to use the simile of Longinus, like the sun in his evening declination; he remits his splendour but retains his magnitude, and pleases more though he dazzles less. THOUGH the contempt with which you have treated the annual migrations of the gay and busy part of mankind, is justified by daily observation, since most of those who leave the town, neither vary their entertainments nor enlarge their notions; yet I suppose you do not intend to represent the practice itself as ridiculous, or to declare that he whose condition puts the distribution of his time into his own power, may not properly divide it between the town and country. That the country, and only the country, displays the inexhaustible varieties of nature, and supplies the philosophical mind with matter for admiration and inquiry, never was denied ; but my curiosity is very little attracted by the colour of a flower, the anatomy of an insect, or the structure of a nest; I am generally employed upon human raanners, and therefore fill up the months of rural leisure with remarks on those who live within the circle of my notice. If writers would more frequently visit those regions of negligence and liberty, they might diversify their representations, and multiply their images, for in the country are original characters chiefly to be found. In cities, and yet more in courts, the minute discriminations which distinguish one from another are for the most part effaced, the pecu liarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bo. dies, and uneven surfaces, lose their points and asperities by frequent attrition against one an other, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity. The prevalence of fashion, the influence of example, the desire of applause, and the dread of censure, obstruct the natural tendencies of the mind, and check the fancy in its first efforts to break forth into experiments of caprice. Few inclinations are so strong as to grow up into habits, when they must struggle with the constant opposition of settled forms and established customs. But in the country every man is a separate and independent being: solitude flatters irregularity with hopes of secrecy, and wealth, removed from the mortification of comparison, and the awe of equality, swells into contemptu | Mr. Busy, finding the economical qualities of ous confidence, and sets blame and laughter at his lady, resigned his affairs wholly into her defiance; the impulses of nature act unrestrain-hands, and devoted his life to his pointers and ed, and the disposition dares to show itself in its true form, without any disguise of hypocrisy, or decorations of elegance. Every one indulges the full enjoyment of his own choice, and talks and lives with no other view than to please himself, without inquiring how far he deviates from the general practice, or considering others as entitled to any account of his sentiments or actions. If he builds or demolishes, opens or encloses, deluges or drains, it is not his care what may be the opinion of those who are skilled in perspective or architecture, it is sufficient that he has no landlord to control him, and that none has any right to examine in what projects the lord of the manor spends his own money on his own grounds. For this reason it is not very common to want subjects for rural conversation. Almost every man is daily doing something which produces merriment wonder or resentment, among his neighbours. This utter exemption from restraint leaves every anomalous quality to operate in its full extent, and suffers the natural character to diffuse itself to every part of life. The pride which, under the check of public observation, would have been only vented among servants and domestics, becomes in a country baronet the torment of a province, and, instead of terminating in the destruction of China ware and glasses, ruins tenants, dispossesses cottagers, and harasses villagers with actions of trespass and bills of indictment. It frequently happens that, even without violent passions, or enormous corruption, the freedom and laxity of a rustic life produce remarkable particularities of conduct or manner. In the province where I now reside, we have one lady eminent for wearing a gown always of the same cut and colour; another for shaking hands with those that visit her; and a third for her unshaken resolution never to let tea or coffee enter her house. But of all the female characters which this place affords, I have found none so worthy of attention as that of Mrs. Busy, a widow, who lost her husband in her thirtieth year, and has since passed her time at the manor-house in the government of her children, and the manage ment of the estate. his hounds. He never visited his estates, but to destroy the partridges or foxes; and often committed such devastations in the range of pleasure, that some of his tenants refused to hold their lands at the usual rent. Their landlady persuaded them to be satisfied, and entreated her husband to dismiss his dogs, with many exact calculations of the ale drank by his companions, and corn consumed by his horses, and remonstrances against the insolence of the huntsman, and the frauds of the groom. The huntsman was too necessary to his happiness to be discarded; and he had still continued to ravage his own estate, had he not caught a cold and a fever by shooting mallards in the fens. His fever was followed by a consumption, which in a few months brought him to the grave. Mrs. Busy was too much an economist to feel either joy or sorrow at his death. She received the compliments and consolations of her neighbours in a dark room, out of which she stole privately every night and morning to see the cows milked; and, after a few days, declared that she thought a widow might employ herself better than in nursing grief: and that, for her part, she was resolved that the fortunes of her children should not be impaired by her neglect. She therefore immediately applied herself to the reformation of abuses. She gave away the dogs, discharged the servants of the kennel and stable, and sent the horses to the next fair, but rated at so high a price that they returned unsold. She was resolved to have nothing idle about her, and ordered them to be employed in common drudgery. They lost their sleekness and grace, and were soon purchased at half the value. She soon disencumbered herself from her weeds, and put on a riding-hood, a coarse apron, and short petticoats, and has turned a large manor into a farm, of which she takes the management wholly upon herself. She rises before the sun to order the horses to their geers, and sees them well rubbed down at their return from work; she attends the dairy morning and evening, and watches when a calf falls that it may be carefully nursed; she walks out among the sheep at noon, counts the lambs, and observes the fences, and where she finds a gap, stops it with a bush till it can be better mended. In harvest she rides a-field in the wagon, and is very liberal of her ale from a wooden bottle. At her leisure hours she looks goose eggs, airs the wool room, and turns the cheese. Mrs. Busy was married at eighteen from a boarding-school, where she had passed her time, like other young ladies, in needle work, with a few intervals of dancing and reading. When she became a bride she spent one winter with her husband in town, where having no idea of any conversation beyond the formalities of a visit, she found nothing to engage her passions; and when she had been one night at court, and two at an opera, and seen the Monument, the Tombs and the Tower, she concluded that Lon-her poultry on the roost. lon had nothing more to show, and wondered that when women had once seen the world they could not be content to stay at home. She therefore went willingly to the ancient seat, and for some years studied housewifery under Mr. Busy's mother, with so much assiduity, that the old lady, when she died, bequeathed her a caudle-cup, a soup-dish, two beakers, and a chest of table linen spun by herself. When respect or curiosity brings visitants to her house, she entertains them with prognostics of a scarcity of wheat, or a rot among the sheep, and always thinks herself privileged to dismiss them when she is to see the hogs fed, or to count The only things neglected about her are her children, whom she has taught nothing but the lowest household duties. In my last visit I met Miss Busy carrying grains to a sick cow, and was entertained with the accomplishments of her eldest son, a youth of such early maturity, that, though he is only sixteen, she can trust him to sell corn in the market. Her younger daugh ter, who is eminent for her beauty, though some what tanned in making hay, was busy in pouring authority can make error venerable, his works out ale to the ploughmen, that every one might have an equal share. I could not but look with pity on this young family, doomed, by the absurd prudence of their mother, to ignorance and meanness; but, when I recommended a more elegant education, was answered, that she never saw bookish or finical people grow rich, and that she was good for nothing herself till she had forgotten the nicety of the boarding-school. I am yours, &c. No. 139.] TUESDAY, JULY 16, 1751. Such is the rule laid down by this great critic, for the disposition of the different parts of a wellconstituted fable. It must begin, where it may be made intelligible without introduction; and end, where the mind is left in repose, without expectation of any farther event. The intermediate passages must join the last effect to the first cause, by a regular and unbroken concatenation; nothing must be therefore inserted which does not apparently arise from something foregoing, and properly make way for something that succeeds it. This precept is to be understood in its rigour only with respect to great and essential events, and cannot be extended in the same force to minuter circumstances and arbitrary decorations, which yet are more happy, as they contribute more to the main design; for it is always a proof of extensive thought and accurate circumspection, to promote various purposes by the same act; and the idea of an ornament admits use, though it seems to exclude necessity. Samson. Our law, or stain my vow of Nazarite. Manoah. With cause this hope relieves thee, and these ger, his father returns with hopes of success in words I as a prophecy receive; for God, Nothing more certain, will not long defer, This part of the dialogue, as it might tend to animate or exasperate Samson, cannot, I think, be censured as wholly superfluous; but the succeeding dispute, in which Samson contends to die, and which his father breaks off, that he may go to solicit his release, is only valuable for its own beauties, and has no tendency to introduce any thing that follows it. his solicitation, upon which he confers with the chorus till their dialogue is interrupted, first by a shout of triumph, and afterwards by screams of horror and agony. As they stand deliberating where they shall be secure, a man who had been present at the show enters, and relates how Samson, having prevailed on his guide to suffer him to lean against the main pillars of the thea trical edifice, tore down the roof upon the spec tators and himself. The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder, Upon the heads of all who sat beneath. -Those two massy pillars, The next event of the drama is the arrival of With horrible confusion, to and fro Delilah, with all her graces, artifices, and allure-He tugg'd, he shook, till down they came, and drew ments. This produces a dialogue, in a very high degree elegant and instructive, from which she retires, after she has exhausted her persuasions, and is no more seen nor heard of; nor has her visit any effect but that of raising the character of Samson. In the fourth act enters Harapha, the giant of Gath, whose name had never been mentioned before, and who has now no other motive of coming than to see the man whose strength and actions are so loudly celebrated: Haraph. -Much I have heard Of thy prodigious might, and feats perform'd Of those encounters, where we might have tried Samson challenges him to the combat; and, af- Chorus. He will directly to the lords, I fear, -Samson, with these immixt, inevitably This is undoubtedly a just and regular catastrophe, and the poem, therefore, has a beginning and an end which Aristotle himself could not have disapproved; but it must be allowed to first act and the last, that either hastens or delays want a middle, since nothing passes between the the death of Samson. The whole drama, if its superfluities were cut of, would scarcely fill a single act; yet this is the tragedy which igno rance has admired, and bigotry applauded. Ir is common, says Bacon, to desire the end without enduring the means. Every member of society feels and acknowledges the necessity of detecting crimes; yet scarce any degree of virtue or reputation is able to secure an informer from public hatred. The learned world has always admitted the usefulness of critical disquisitions, yet he that attempts to show, however modestly, the failures of a celebrated writer, shall surely irritate his admirers, and incur the imputation of envy, captiousness and malignity. ceed to examine the sentiments of Milton's traWith this danger full in my view, I shall pro At last, in the fifth act, appears a messenger from the lords, assembled at the festival of Dagon, with a summons by which Samson is re-gedy, which, though much less liable to censure quired to come and entertain them with some than the disposition of his plan, are, like those of proof of his strength. Samson, after a short other writers, sometimes exposed to just excepexpostulation, dismisses him with a firm and tions for want of care, or want of discernment. resolute refusal; but, during the absence of the messenger, having awhile defended the propriety of his conduct, he at last declares himself moved by a secret impulse to comply, and utters some dark presages of a great event to be brought to pass by his agency, under the direction of Providence. Sams. Be of good courage; I begin to feel Sentiments are proper and improper as they consist more or less with the character and circumstances of the person to whom they are at tributed, with the rules of the composition in which they are found, or with the settled and un alterable nature of things. It is common among the tragic poets to intro duce their persons alluding to events or opinions, of which they could not possibly have any knowledge. The barbarians of remote or newly-dis. covered regions often display their skill in European learning. The god of love is mentioned in Tamerlane with all the familiarity of a Roman | which, depending only upon sounds, lose their epigrammatist; and a late writer has put Har-existence by the change of a syllable. Of this vey's doctrine of the circulation of the blood into kind, is the following dialogue: the mouth of a Turkish statesman, who lived near two centuries before it was known even to philosophers or anatomists. Milton's learning, which acquainted him with the manners of the ancient eastern nations, and his invention, which required no assistance from the common cant of poetry, have preserved him from frequent outrages of local or chronological propriety. Yet he has mentioned Chalybean steel, of which it is not very likely that his chorus should have heard, and has made Alp the general name of a mountain, in a region where the Alps could scarcely be known: No medicinal liquor can assuage, Nor breath of cooling air from snowy Alp. He has taught Samson the tales of Circe, and the Syrenes, at which he apparently hints in his colloquy with Delilah: -I know thy trains, But the grossest error of this kind is the solemn introduction of the phoenix in the last scene; which is faulty, not only as it is incongruous to the personage to whom it is ascribed, but as it is so evidently contrary to reason and nature, that it ought never to be mentioned but as a fable in any serious poem: -Virtue giv❜n for lost, In the Arabian woods embost And lay ere while a holocaust; From out our ashy womb now teem'd And tho' her body die, her fame survives, Chor. But had we best retire? I sec a storm. Sams. Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain And yet more despicable are the lines in which Manoah's paternal kindness is commended by the chorus: Fathers are wont to lay up for their sons. Samson's complaint of the inconveniences of imprisonment is not wholly without verbal quaintness: -I, a prisoner chain'd, scarce freely draw From the sentiments we may properly descend to the consideration of the language, which, in imitation of the ancients, is through the whole dialogue remarkably simple and unadorned, seldom heightened by epithets, or varied by figures; yet sometimes metaphors find admission, even where their consistency is not accurately preserved. Thus Samson confounds loquacity with a shipwreck: How could I once look up, or heave the head, And the chorus talks of adding fuel to flame in report: He's gone, and who knows how he may report The versification is in the dialogue much more Another species of impropriety is the unsuitableness of thoughts to the general character of smooth and harmonious than in the parts allotted the poem. The seriousness and solemnity of to the chorus, which are often so harsh and distragedy necessarily reject all pointed or epigram-sonant, as scarce to preserve, whether the lines matical expressions, all remote conceits and op- end with or without rhymes, any appearance of position of ideas. Samson's complaint is there- metrical regularity: fore too elaborate to be natural: As in the land of darkness, yet in light, By privilege of death and burial, From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs. Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he, Irresistible Samson; whom unarmed No strength of man, or fiercest wild beast, could withstand; Who tore the lion, as the lion tears the kid 7 Since I have thus pointed out the faults of Milton, critical integrity requires that I should All allusions to low and trivial objects, with endeavour to display his excellences, though which contempt is usually associated, are doubt- they will not easily be discovered in short quoless unsuitable to a species of composition which tations, because they consist in the justness of ought to be always awful though not always diffuse reasonings, or in the contexture and me magnificent. The remark therefore of the cho-thod of continued dialogues; this play having rus on good and bad news seems to want ele vation : Manoah. A little stay will bring some notice hither, none of those descriptions, similes, or splendid sentences, with which other tragedies are so la vishly adorned. Yet some passages may be selected which seem to deserve particular notice, either as con. taining sentiments of passion, representations of life, precepts of conduct, or sallies of imagina tion. It is not easy to give a stronger represen⚫ |