The queen only laughed, and expressed sentiments which have been happily rendered by our poet Cowper: "War is a game, which were their subjects wise, Kings should not play at." Nevertheless, in a case like the present, we give leave even to subjects to play at it, as the result of the conflict need inspire no remorse. Perhaps some among the great body of officers in our island might derive profit, in a military sense, from this amusement: and though we must regret the necessity that renders the profession of war honourable, yet, while that necessity continues (and we see no hope of its being removed) the advantages to be derived from studying it as a science must be more than tolerated: they must be commended. FROM THE MONTHLY REVIEW. Sermons to Young Ladies. By James Fordyce, D. D. Philadelphia, republished by Mathew Carey, 1809. THE author of these sermons is certainly a man of taste and genius; and what is still greater praise, he appears to have a warm and generous concern for the best interests of humanity. His style, his manner, the observations he makes, plainly show that he knows the world; that he has carefully studied, and is well acquainted with the human heart; and that he is possessed of every qualification necessary to execute the im portant task he has undertaken.There are, indeed, to the best of our recollection, no compositions of this kind in the English language, in which are to be found greater delicacy of sentiment, correctness of imagination, elegance of taste, or that contain such genuine pictures of life and manners. The author's style of preaching is entirely new, having never, as far as we know, been before attempted. It requires uncommon talents to succeed in it: and he has succeeded to admiration. His design is to improve the most amiable and most agreeable part of the creation, for whose best interests he professes an unfeigned regard and fervent zeal. He entertains the highest idea of their importance and destination; considers them not in that debasing light in which they are too often considered, as formed only to be domestick drudges, and the slaves of our pleasures: but as intended to be reasonable and agreeable companions, faithful and affectionate friends, the sweetners and the charm of human life; in a word, as designed to soften our hearts, and polish our manners. Though nature, observing the same distinction here, as in the more delicate frame of their bodies, has, in his opinion, formed the faculties of their minds less vigorous than those of men, yet she has bestowed upon them, he thinks, a greater sensibility of heart, and sweetness of temper; a nicer and quicker discernment of characters; a more lively fancy; and a greater delicacy of taste and sentiment. Attend, then, to his instructions, ye fair! He addresses you in the character of an affectionate brother; and you will find him a discreet guardian, a prudent counsellor, a faithful friend, and a rational companion. Hearken to him, and he will teach you how to captivate the heart of every virtuous beholder-how to spread a lustre round your persons superiour to that of all the diamonds in the universe-how to enrich and adorn your understanding-how to enjoy solitude-how to shine in conversation without designing it-how to inspire a mixture of complacence and respect-how to unite decency and sense with mirth and joy. Take him for your guide, and he will lead you from the wide and dangerous walks of idle amusement and dissipation, from the gay and fluttering scenes of vanity, into the peaceful and delightful paths of knowledge, genuine beauty, and elegance. He will show you how to escape dishonour and remorse, reproach and ridicule: and prove, that sense and capacity, joined to meekness and modesty, are exempted from the condition of every thing else; which is, to lose its influence, when it loses its novelty. Attend to him, and he will teach you to cultivate genuine worth instead of artificial forms; to practice undissembled sweetness, instead of fictitious courtesy; to level the fantastick structures of pride, and to raise on their ruins the plain and modest, but pleasing and grateful fabrick of meekness and humility. He will show you the difference between flattery and approbation, between smiles and attachment. He will direct you in the choice of your companions and diversions; how to guard against the follies of your own sex, and the arts of ours. He will teach you to despise, or rather to pity, the futility of those frivolous fops, those empty, conceited, and insignificant danglers, that are to be seen, in such numbers, in every place of publick resort-whose capacity reaches no higher than flattering every young woman they see, into good humour, by telling her perpetually, how handsome, and how fine she is. He will teach you to dread and to guard with the utmost caution against those cool, complimental, smooth tongued libertines-those sly, insinuating, insidious deceivers, who have steeled their breasts by system, whom the boasted principles of infidelity has raised to a glorious contempt of all laws, human and divine, delivered from the vulgar conceit of immortality, and enabled to conquer the little weaknesses of nature, with the ignoble prejudices of education: and such wily wretches, such obdurate and flagitious offenders, he assures you, abound every where.Listen then to this faithful and kind monitor, and he will convince you, that your safety lies in retreat and vigilance, in sobriety and prudence, in virtuous friendship and rational conversation: in domestick, elegant, and intellectual accomplishments, in the guardianship of Omnipotence, which can only be obtained by TRUE RELIGION. Such, and many more such, are the important lessons this excellent preacher will teach you; nor does he approach you, ye fair ones, with an austere countenance, or an awful solemnity. On the contrary, his aspect is cheerful and sprightly; he is no less entertaining than he is instructive; he thinks those persons, strangers to true wisdom, who suppose her monitions incompatible with cheerful images or joyful ideas; and he is too well acquainted with the human mind, to hope to reform its errours without conciliating its affections, or to imagine that the tutoring of terror alone, as he expresses himself, will produce the love of goodness. Happy the mothers who follow his maxims, in forming the taste and manners of their daughters! happy, thrice happy, the daughters, who are blessed with such mothers. FROM THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE FOR JULY, 1809. SOME expectation was raised in the publick mind from the "Batchelor" of Mr. Moore, better known by the name of Anacreon Moore; but it would be difficult, even amid the mass of modern publications, to point out one so destitute of every qualification to render it worthy of notice. SPIRIT OF THE MAGAZINES. The following is an account of a hunting match in Athol, for the entertainment of Mary, Queen of Scots, extracted from "Gunn's Historical Inquiry respecting the Harp." I SHALL give it in the words of an eye-witness. "I had a sight of a very extraordinary sport. In the year 1563, the earl of Athol, a prince of the blood-royal, had, with much trouble and vast expense, provided a hunting match for the entertainment of our most illustrious and most gracious queen. Our people call this a royal hunting. I was then a young man, and was present on that occasion. Two thousand Highlanders were employed to drive to the hunting ground all the deer from the woods and hills of Athol, Badenoch, Marr, Murray, and the countries about. As these Highlanders use a light dress, and are very swift of foot, they went up and down so nimbly, that, in less than two months time, they brought together two thousand red deer, besides roes and fallow deer. The queen, the great men, and a number of others, were in a glen, or narrow valley, when all these deer were brought before them; believe me, the whole body moved forward in something like battle order. This sight still strikes me, and ever will strike me; for they had a leader whom they followed close wherever he moved. This leader was a very fine stag, with a very high head. The sight delighted the queen very much, but she soon had cause for fear, upon the earl's (who had been from his early days accustomed to such sights) addressing her thus: 'Do you observe that stag who is foremost of the herd? There is danger from that stag; for if either fear or rage should force him from the ridge of that hill, let every one look to himself, for none of us will be out of the way of harm, as the rest will all follow this one; and having thrown us under foot, they will open a passage to the hill behind us.' What happened a moment after, confirmed this opinion; for the queen ordered one of the best dogs to be let loose upon a wolf; this the dog pursues the leading stag was frightened-he flies by the same way he had come there-the rest rush after him, and break out where the thickest body of the Highlanders was. They had nothing for it now but to throw themselves flat on the heath, and to allow the deer to pass over them. It was told the queen, that several of the Highlanders had been wounded, and that two or three had been killed outright; and the whole body of deer had got off, had not the Highlanders, by their skill in hunting, fallen upon a stratagem, to cut off the rear from the main body. It was of those that had been separated, that the queen's dogs, and those of the nobility, made slaughter. There was killed that day three hundred and sixty deer, with five wolves." SIR, TO THE EDITOR OF THE UNIVERSAL MAGAZINE. On the Conduct of Lady M. W. THE sensibility of lady Montague is generally supposed to have been equal to her wit. A higher encomium could scarcely be passed, for in wit she certainly was not inferiour to any of her sex. It is with reluctance that I point to lady Mary's conduct, in regard to Henry Fielding, as a proof that she could be disdainful and unfeeling; but a just appreciation of characters, which are held forth for publick applause, is so necessary to the welfare of the moral world, that my presumption in this particular must need little apology. on Henry Fielding was second cousin to lady Montague, both being descended in the same degree from George Fielding, earl of Desmond. In addition to his claim on the score of affinity, Fielding's pretensions, as a gentleman and a wit, were assuredly sufficient to entitle him to the same consideration bestowed Pope; but these two writers appear to have been received by her ladyship in a very different manner. Pope was admitted to an extreme of familiarity, and his letters are written in a correspondent train of confidence. Fielding waited at her door, as the poet attends his patron, and concludes a letter, which appears expressive of his usual manner to lady Mary, in these words:" I shall do myself the honour of calling at your ladyship's door to morrow, at eleven, which, if it be an improper hour, I beg to know from your servant what other time will be more convenient." The man thus liable to rejection, and thus distant in mode of address, was her cousin, and of high rank in letters; but he was necessitous. Pope, whose epistles denote the acknowledged consequence of the writer, and who could readily appoint the proper hours for the lady to call on him, was rich. There lay the most important difference; for ladies of wit and sen Montague towards H. Fielding. sibility, like the common world, are fond, it seems, of a gilded toy. Throughout every letter in which lady Mary mentions Fielding, she is entirely silent on the relationship that existed between them; and her ladyship admired his talents; but then she knew his poverty. "Since I was born," she observes in a letter to her daughter, "no original has appeared, excepting Congreve and Fielding, who would, I believe, have approached nearer to his excellences if not forced by necessity to publish without correction, and throw many productions into the world, he would have thrown into the fire, if meat could have been got without money, or money without scribbling. The greatest virtue, justice, and the most distinguished prerogative of mankind, writing, when duly executed, do honour to human nature; but when degenerated into trades, are the most contemptible way of getting bread." Her ladyship regrets the death of Fielding, but merely as a writer, and as a being that relished existence. Lady Mary Wortley Montague appears at one period to have been afraid, and at another ashamed, to own for a cousin the author of Tom Jones! "I am sorry," writes lady Mary, "for H. Fielding's death, not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but I believe he lost more than others; as no man enjoyed life more than he did, though few had less reason to do so; the highest of his preferment being raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery. His happy constitution (even when he had with great pains half demolished it) made him forget every thing when he was before a venison pasty, or over a flask of champaigne; and I am persuaded he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in a garret." It may be averred that the dissipated habits of Fielding rendered him an improper intimate for a lady; but still he was entitled to the consideration due to a relation and a man of genius. The frequent low pleasures in which Fielding was accustomed to indulge may, perhaps, in some part, be attributed to the scantiness of his finances. Lady Montague was con nected with many persons of consequence and power. Through the medium of these she might have recommended her cousin to the notice of the court, and have given him an opportunity of proving that he was as well calculated to be an honour to his family in point of general demeanour, as from poignancy of wit and fertility of imagination. I am, sir, your's, &c. J. N. B. SIR, TO THE EDITOR OF THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE. YOUR correspondent, Mr. Bannantine's remarks on pastoral poetry, are very ingenious and entertaining. But I do not exactly agree with him in his opinion of Theocritus, and other pastoral writer. They deserved, I judge, better treatment. With respect to Shenstone's celebrated ballad, I am one of those few, who think with Mr. B. that a great part of it borders upon nonsense; inasmuch as to render the whole ridiculous. It is an excellent subject for the burlesque and I really wonder that its namby-pamby strain should have received praise from Johnson, and that it was never travestied before"the Devon and Cornwall Poets," thought proper to make merry with it. For the amusement of your readers, I shall insert in this place a few stanzas from the parody alluded to. After which, I must beg leave to recur to my first position, that Theocritus" deserved better treatment." In reading the following "risum teneatis?" "My beds are all furnished with fleas, Whose bitings invite me to scratch; Well stocked are my orchards with jays, And my pigsties white over with thatch: I seldom a pimple have met, Such health does magnesia bestow; My horse-pond is bordered with wet, Where the flap-ducks and sting-nettles grow. I have found out a gift for my fair, In my Cheshire some rotton I've found; But let me the plunder forbear, Nor give that dear bosom a wound: Though oft from her lips I have heard, That the rotten her palate would please; Yet he ne'er could be true, she averred; Who would rob the poor mite of his cheese." "I sleep not a wink all the night, And my days they do dolefully pass, Till I see her (O! exquisite sight!) Come tripping it over the grass. -She shall be milking her cow." FROM THE UNIVERSAL MAGAZINE. Some Observations upon the Habits attributed by Herodotus to the Crocodiles of the Nile. By M. Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire.* THE history of Herodotus is one it is also, perhaps, the most imporof the most valuable of literary pro- tant, on account of the number and ductions. It is the most ancient, and value of the facts which it contains. * Translated from the "Annales du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle." |