tions, and trace the changes of the human mind as they are modified by various institutions and accidental influences of climate or custom from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondence of decrepitude. He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths which will always be the same; he must, therefore, content himself with the slow progress of his name; contemn the applause of his own time, and commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations; as a being superior to time and place. His labour is not yet at an end; he must know many languages and many sciences; -and that his style may be worthy of his thoughts, must, by incessant practice, familiarise to himself every delicacy of

speech

4

speech and grace of harmony.' In this attempt he fails, and he therefore continues his travels; and at last, weary of wandering, he resolves to return to his native country and pass the remainder of his life in the midst of his friends.

But

*This idea of the requisite qualifications for a poet is certainly vigorous and sublime; but I very much fear it will be found, upon a nice examination, in many parts purely ideal : or, if it be all just, we must deny that appellation to those upon whom the concurrent suffrages of mankind have conferred it. Not even the facred majesty of Homer could assume that title, if his claims be estimated by this description. Do the annals of the world or the remotest volumes of antiquity that are extant, boast the man who possessed all these qualities and rendered them subservient to the purposes of poetry? Precepts are to be considered as so many truths deduced by reason from the actual existence of man, from the dictates of experience, and the authority of remote ages. Those which are derived from any other source can aspire merely to the probability of theory, and they are often only. the vague conjectures of a glowing intellect and an ardent fancy. If those exalted minds which have produced such noble specimens of composition, and which have been the delight and admiration of successive ages, possess any solid claims to the adoration which have been conceded to them, we must from thence draw our precepts; for that excellence must be allowed to be great which has stood the shocks of barbarism, and emerged unsullied from the clouds of ignorance. t And, if such be the case, we can regard this description of Johnson's in some particulars, only as the voluntary effusion of a sprightly imagination, which, in the language of Shakespeare:

"Doth

But he is disappointed. He finds his father is no more; and of his friends the greater part are dead: others do not remember him, and some consider him as corrupted by foreign manners. He therefore resolves to seek for that content in the happy valley which he, in vain, sought in the world. But here it is also denied. In the subsequent part of the book he is little conspicuous.

Johnson, warmed with the idea of this imaginary being and his misfortunes, makes him observe, in his colloquy with Rasselas, that there" is so much infelicity in the world, that scarce any man has leisure from his own distresses to estimate the comparative happiness of others." This is, indeed, a querulous eloquence which renders every

thing

"Doth glance from Heav'n to earth,

From earth to Heav'n,

And bodies forth the forms

Of things unknown.

The Picture undoubtedly contains an assemblage of striking images, and though it comprises too much, yet it has some parts exquisitely beautiful. Yet I am afraid that any one who may chance to read it, and resigning himself to the dominion of fancy, will be apt to exclaim with Rasselas, "Enongh! thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet."

thing alike miserable and gloomy. The history of Imlac is not the offspring of a candid moralist who seeks to inculcate important truths beneath the pleasing veil of fiction; it is the well-connected fable of an amusing novelist, and bears no more resemblance to real life than do the fabulous adventures of Lemuel Gulliver. The powers of Johnson's mind were certainly great, but they were seldom assisted by the irradiations of truth, or directed by the hand of wisdom. He imagines evils which were never felt, and frequently injures life by misrepresentations. He was fond of exaggeratory declamation, which he employed to adorn and invigorate his prejudices.

*

As Rasselas is a series of adventures and histories which all terminate in the same doleful manner, it would be idle to select any other entire narrative. But some passages afford room for remark, from which a few shall be selected for my present purpose.

1

bIt has been related, that Johnson experienced some infelicity in matrimony, and this has, in general, been the cause

assigned

assigned (though, I think, without foundation) for his known acrimony, in speaking of this state, or its preceeding one of courtship. But whatever may have been the cause, it is not my purpose to enquire. In Rasselas, he considers it as universally wretched, and celibacy as no less so. Nekayah, in her search of happiness, enters the domestic habitation, and finds discord every where prevailing. She meets neither with filial duty, nor parental affection; with fraternal harmony, nor conjugal bliss. She is every where surprized with the dissentions which exist, as well beneath the thatched cottage, as the stately dome of domestic splendour. Distress may be frequent, but it cannot be universal, except in an universal calamity. In the horrors of a famine, or a plague, every one will be found equally wretched, for every one will be in equal danger; but in a country at peace, and labouring neither under the influence of a pestilence nor a famine, it must be occasional and rare; and, I hope, for the honour of human nature, that domestic discord is less prevalent

than