When my understanding was awak- quit that happy life which we led ened by dint of years, nature impelled together? Why did my eager imme to seek a companion: you refined portunities thrust you from us? You the ardour of my desires by the soli- were delighted with your work. I dity of reason; the strength of your saw it: I felt it: I was sure of it.arguments alone taught me to subdue You appeared happy when I was;

knew it: this love sheltered me from the snares of vice; it inspired me with a desire for things which were virtuous; it imprinted on my imagination the sacred laws of virtue.When, at length, I beheld this ineffable object of my adoration, when I felt the empire of her charms, all that could penetrate a soul, soft, rayishing, penetrated mine with a sensation 50 exquisite that words can but poorly express. Blissful days of my first affections! Days, whose remembrance is cherished in my heart. Why can not ve return, and never cease again? Henceforth actuate my whole existence! Oh God, I would not with another eternity.

t. I loved Sophia even before I the tender caresses of Sophia seemed to flatter your paternal heart. You loved us, you were pleased with us, and you quitted us! But for your absence I should yet have been happy; my son would now live perhaps, or at least would not have closed his existence in the midst of strangers. His dear and virtuous mother too would yet live in the arms of her husband. Wretched retreat, which unceasingly exposes me to all the horrors of my fate. No! never beneath thy eyes would these misfortunes have approached my family; in abandoning me you incurred greater ills upon me than you had ever done me good during my life.

Soon did Heaven cease to bless the house in which you no longer resided. Misfortunes and afflictions succeeded

Vain regrets! useless desires! all is gone! vanished never to return!When, after so much languishing, without intermission. In a few such ardent sighs I obtained the prize, months we lost the father and mother all my vows were repaid. Husband, of Sophia, and lastly her daughter, and yet a lover, I found in the tran- her charming girl whom she so quil possession a happiness of another much doated on, whom she idolized, nature, but not less than that of dé- whom she would have followed. At sire. Oh my master, you thought this last blow her firmness was stagyou had known this enchanting girl. gered, and it left her. Till this period How much you was deceived! You she had lived content and peaceable knew my mistress, my wife; but you in solitude, she had been ignorant of never knew Sophia. Her charmis, of the bitterness of life, she had not every nature, were inexhaustless; armed her soul against misfortunes of every moment seemed to renew them, this kind; it was sensible and easily and the last day of her life disclosed affected. She felt these losses as we to me some which I had never known naturally feel our first; and they were before. indeed the commencement of ours. Nothing could exhaust her tears; the death of her daughter made her feel more keenly that of her mother; unceasing she called on one or the other with sighs; she made those places resound with their names where she had once received their innocent caresses; every object which recalled them augmented her grief; I resolved to take her away from these causes of painful remembrance. I had, in the capital, what they call business, but

Already father of two children, I divided my time between an adored wife and the pledges of our mutual love. You enabled me to lay down a plan of education, similar to mine, for my son; and my daughter, beneath the eyes of her mother, had learnt to resemble her. All my employment was the care of Sophia's patrimony; mine I had neglected to enjoy my felicity. Deceitful happiness! Trebly have I felt thy inconstancy! Thy bound is but a point, which had never been so to me till and when we arrive at its height we this period. I proposed to her to must quickly fall. And was it your follow thither a female friend, (an place, inhuman father, to cause this acquaintance which she had contractdecline? By what fatality did you ed in the neighbourhood), and whe

--

de

had been under the necessity of ac- that was not her. I sought her no companying her husband. She con- longer; I possessed her, and her sented to prevent being separated charms embellished those objects from me, and not penetrating my now as much as they had disfigured motive. Her affliction was too great them in my youth. But quickly to attempt to alleviate it. To parti- these very objects weakened my cipate in it, and to weep with her, sire as I partook of them. Initiated, were the only consolations which by degrees, into all those frivolous could be given. amusements, my heart insensibly lost its primal energy, and became incapable of action or animation. Restless, I wandered from pleasure to pleasure; I sought every thing, and with every thing I became wearied: I was pleased only with what I did not possess, and existed in confusion instead of amusement. I felt a revolution, of which I desire not convic tion. I forbore to look into myself, fearful of finding nothing. All my attachments were thus weakened, all my affections were thus cooled; I had substituted, for reality, a jargon of sentiment and morality. I was a gallant without tenderness, a stoic without virtue, and a sage occupied with follies; there was nothing left of your Emilius but the name and some maxims. My frankness, my liberty,

As we approached the capital, I felt myself shook with certain forebodings which I had never before experienced; sad presentiments arose within my breast; all that I had seen, ali that I heard from you, respecting great cities, made me tremble at the idea of our residing in this one. I dreaded to expose so sure a union to the many dangers which there might disturb it. I shuddered as I beheld the afflicted Sophia, in reflecting that I thus myself voluntarily dragged so many incomparable virtues and charms to that gulph of prejudices and vices, where every vestige of innocence and happiness became annihilated.

However secure in her and thyself, I despised this prudent advice, which I regarded as a vain prognostic; suffering it to torment me, I still my pleasures, my duties, you, my treated it as a chimera. Alas! little son, Sophia herself, all which once did I expect to see it so quickly and animated me, which exalted my mind so cruelly realized. I little suspected to the full plenitude of my existence, that I did not go to search misfortune now, in detaching themselves by dein the capital, but that it followed me. grees, seemed to detach me from myself, and to leave, in my oppressed soul, an overpowering sentiment of vacuity and annihilation. But, the flame which was apparently extin guished, slumbered only beneath the ashes too quickly to burst forth with redoubled fury.

[To be continued.]

How shall I describe to you the two years which we passed in this fatal city; how shall I disclose the fatal effect which it had on my soul, and on my fate. Too well do you know those sad events, whose remembrance, effaced in our days of happiness, now came with redoubled force, and exaggerate my woes in leading me to their source. What an alteration did my courtesy towards two amiable connections which habit had ripened into friendship produce in me! How much did example and imitation, against whose you had so well fortified my heart, insensibly inspire me with a desire for those frivolous things which, when younger, I had sense to despise.How different it is to view things, diverted by other objects, and to be solely occupied with those which strike us. It was no longer the time when my heated imagination sought nothing but Sophia, and rejected all

OBSERVATIONS upon CowPER.
SIR,

has happened to Cowper, as it
has to
to be remembered by a single pro-
duction, while other parts of their
writings, though probably inferior to
one particular work, are yet well
worthy of notice. It is thus that the
Liberty and Britannia of Thomson
are scarcely known by name to many
who read his Seasons with rapture:
yet, can it be denied that both Liberty
and Britannia have many fine pas

sages in them? Thus also with Cowper, rough lines, to no meaning in musical whose Task has so completely occu- ones. There is, in this same poem, pied the vantage ground of his fame four lines which are truly characteris that his other poems, written in heroic tical of the ardent mind of Cowper: couplets, are almost forgotten. But

air,

heat.

an attentive reader may observe in Place me where winter breathes his keenest these last the same cast of thought, And I will sing if liberty be there: the same glow of fancy, and the And I will sing at liberty's dear feet same energy of language, as prevail In Afric's torrid clime, or India's fiercest in his blank verse. The peculiar vigour of Cowper's thoughts could not indeed accommodate itself to a The manly sentiments which these weak or flimsy style: and his notions lines contain, were eminently congenial to the heart and feelings of the poet, nor could he have expressed them more forcibly in blank verse. think, indeed, that Cowper's rhimes are equal to his blank verse; and I wish that his poems, so written, were as much read as his Task. They would amply repay the time. What can be finer than the following character of the great Chatham ? ·

I

of versification led him to adopt rather the strong and manly verse of Dryden, than the polished and harmonious couplets of Pope. A few instances from his Table Talk, for example, will prove this. Take the following character of a French

man:

Born in a climate softer far than our's
Not form'd like us with such Herculean
pow'rs,

The Frenchman, easy, debonnair, and
brisk,

Give him his lass, his fiddle, and his frisk,
Is always happy, reign whoever may,
And laughs the sense of misery far away:
He drinks his simple beverage with a gust:
And, feasting on an onion and a crust,
We never feel the alacrity and joy
With which he shouts and carols, Vive le

Roi!
Fill'd with as much true merriment and
glee

As if he heard his King say-Slave be free.

The sense is here protracted through the whole paragraph, instead of being closed with the couplet, as is usually done by Pope and in this respect he imitates Dryden. Indeed he has expressed his opinion of versification in one of his letters, in which he avows his preference for meaning in

In him, Demosthenes was heard again,
Liberty taught him her Athenian strain:
She cloth'd him with authority and awe,
Spoke from his lips, and in his looks gave
law.

His speech, his form, his action, full of
grace,

And all his country beaming in his face,
He stood, as some inimitable hand
Would strive to make a Paul or Tully

stand.

No sycophant or slave, that dar'd oppose
Her sacred cause, but trembled when he
rose;
And every venal stickler for the yoke
Felt himself crushed at the first word he
spoke.

I will not trespass further on your attention, or that of your readers, but conclude, Sir, by subscribing myself, Your's, &c. Z1

Leeds, Aug. 12, 1810,

CRITICISM.

"Nulli negabimus, nulli differemus justitiam."

1 vol. 8vo. 1810.

TALES OF ROMANCE, with other lish Poetry. The fictions are, some POEMS; including Selections from of them, wild and improbable, yet Propertius. By C. A. ELTON. interesting: while others are both pleasing and natural. They are twelve in number, and are parated in almost Mr. Elton acknowledges, deriv- as many sorts of metre. He has some ed from the Gesta Romanorum, a book times adopted that of the old English which Warton has mentioned with ballad, in imitation of Walter Scott, commendation, in his History of Eng- and with equal success, Mr. Elton

THESE

HESE Tales of Romance are, as

UNIVERSAL MAG. VOL. XIV.

Q

cave,

may perhaps value this commendation, The columns of stone, that encircled the as he seems, from his prefatory lines, to entertain a sufficiently high opinion of that author's writings.

"From his cradle three lustres must dark pass away,

"And the sun must be hid from his eyes; "If before he encounter the splendor of day, "The clear orbs of vision depriv'd of their

ray

"Shall in vain seek the light of the skies." A mountain was hollow'd, a cavern delv'd wide

With arches and pillars of stone;
A fire, that with cedars blaz'd fragrant, defied
The damps that arose from the salt ocean-
tide,

And with far-streaming radiancy shone.
The ivory couches with purple were dight,
The walls hung with arras around;
There hawks, hounds, and horses, were
pictur'd to sight,
And woods waving green, and clear streams
purling bright,
[sound.
And huntsmen their horns seem'd to
Beaten gold all the ceiling's arch'd surface
o'erlaid;

Birds warbled in cages of gold;
And as if by some minstrel's invisible aid,
With musical echo soft instruments play'd
As the passing waves outwardly roll'd.

Were fraught with philosophy's lore; In letters of gold did a sage there engrave The words of the wise, and the deeds of the brave,

The feats and the virtues of yore.

"The Duke's Feast.

THE moon had sunk in clouds; a storm

was nigh,

And eddy leaves came scattering on the His foot on cushion rais'd of cloth of gold, One sate beneath a purple canopy:

blast;