who is still listening. Among the pictures, are the Holy Family of Corrigeo, the young St. John of Raphael, a Maddalena of Guido, and the Venus of Titian. These are mentioned by Mr. S. merely as articles in his hotch-potch cat alogue. As the corridors of this gallery are replete with chronolog ical specimens of the fine arts, and as its saloons contain still so many exquisite pieces of the classical painters, we would recommend the reader to consult "Saggio Istoria della Galleria di Firenze," 8vo. 2 vols. and a more modern descrip tion in French, printed at Florence, 1804. We leave Florence for Siena, and though the country to this city is so picturesque, we hear nothing of it. At Siena, our traveller “ staid, while his horses were feed ing," and makes not an observation, except this very sensible one, "the Cathedral has a linsey-woolsey ap pearance." He now passes along the still and retired regions of Balsena and Montipascone, without a single remark, though the poet here recommended so strongly, this pleasant and sweet retreat from the cookshops, and noise, and dust of the city. * Si te grata quies, et primam somnus in horam, Delectat, si te pulvis, strepitusque rotarum, Si lædit caupona, Ferentinum ire jubebo.” Horat. We are now in the ancient cap ital of the world, and seem forever to have lost our guide among ruined temples and falling monu ments. We sometimes see him leaning against a tottering column, and sometimes catch him gliding through the broken arches of huge aqueducts; and so do we the lean and cold-blooded priest, or the fat and sweltering capuchin. Here This was an ancient town, situated between Montefioscone and Viterbo. Vol. III. No. 2. M again is the same fulsome inflation of the writer's style; and because his subject is more sublime, he thinks he must become more turgid. It will be too fatiguing to us, and too uninteresting to our readers, to trace the heavy and Gothick feet of our author through the solemn and dark ruins of imperial Rome. We will not profane its deep gloom and awful assemblage of stupendous objects, by here holding communion with him. Of St. Peter's he has said much, and much incorrectly. In his his tory of it, he asserts, that it was three hundred years in building; it was but one hundred and six. Instead of its being begun in 1450, in the time of pope Nicholas fifth, it was commenced under Julio second, in 1506, by Bramante, on the spot where the first christian church was built by Constantine. Bramante, in the sublimity of his genius, so projected St. Peter's, that the most perfect of the ancient temples, the pantheon, could be sustained by this solid superstructure of christian faith. That is, that the dimensions of this ca thedral should be proportionable to the dimensions of the pantheon for its dome. But the lines of Bramante, bea ing reduced by the succeeding artichects of St. Peter's, the dome was consequently reduced a few feet in diameter, and in 1588 Domenico Fontana hung this bright hemisphere over that world of architectural beauties. The colonnade, which was afterwards added, (and which our author calls a sweeping forest of 300 columns,") is the splendid work of Bernini. We must now confess, that we have no sympathy in a single de scription of Mr. S. at Rome, and we can remain with him there no longer. He evidently has a soul, which can reflect no brightness in the full splendour of St. Peter's, and which can feel no melancholy in the fading glory of the Colis œum. Tivoli, the ancient Tibur, was, probably,a deserted city in the time of Augustus, as it was built some hundred years even before the time of Romulus. Horace says, -Mihi non jam regia Roma, Mr. S. speaks of Tivoli, as if its peculiarity consisted in its having once been a splendid city, and not in the classical remembrance of the sweet retirement of Horace, where he spent such merry times with Mecenas; nor in the splendour and magnificence of the villa's of Lucullus and Adrian. HoFace thus speaks of it. Tibur argoo positum colono, On the modern Frescatti and the ancient Tusculum our traveller is wholly silent, though, on its hills was the "Superni villa candens Tusculi, of Horace, and there Cicero enjoyed his "Dies TuscuIanos." We are now fast approaching the end of our journey, having to trace a distance only of one hundred and fifty miles to Naples. Here we have sometimes to move with a slow and solemn step, through the gloomy ranges of se pulchral monuments, overhung with the mists of the campagna, and sometimes to saunter listlessly along the mellow fields and through the ethereal expanse of the ager Felix. along the Chiaia, his eye reposes on the smooth and quiet surface of its bay, or is elevated by the dark and lofty promontory of Misenum, or brightened by the blazing summit of Vesuvius. If he be a traveller of pleasure, at Naples his whole senses may enjoy the fullest repletion. His eye may forever move through new tracts of delightful vision, in its environs; his ear may be filled with the softest sounds of Neapolitan musick; his odour will be in the fragrant breezes from the ager Felix; and his touch will be in the sweetest state of delectation in the universal contact of the softest and purest atmosphere. If he be a scholar, in its neighbourhood he will find himself in the fairy land of classical poetry; and the ideal regions of ancient romance will now have the visible locality of the Baian coast. He will now ascend the mountain, where Eneas piously placed the bones of his companion Misenus, after his battle with Triton. "At pius Æneas ingenti mole sepulchrum Monte fubæreo, qui nunc Misenum ab illo Having now seen performed the funeral rites of Misenus, he descends the promontory withÆneas, passes the temple of Apollo,* and, in order to consult the Cumœan sibyl,† enters with him her resounding cavern. "At pius Æneas arces, quibus altus Apollo Præsidet, horrendæque procul secreta sibyllæ, Antrumimmane petit." Ib. he commences with Æneas his deHaving consulted the prophetess, The walls of this temple, which stand near Naples, as a city, has every thing to interest and please the traveller, whether his sight be confused with the moving column of the entrance of the cave, are still entire. men, which struggles through the Toledo, or whether, as he wanders The cave of the sibyl is to the eastward of the lake of Avernus. It may be passed, with much difficulty, to the end where it overhangs the sea. scent to hell, and his visitation of or in project seems easier, than that Elysium. of travels; and, consequently, every man, who has travelled, thinks he has a right to become author. Most of the requisites of fine writing are, however, here necessary, from the simplest narration to the fulness and splendour of figurative description. The mind must here observe closely, and without prejudice, and we must relate with correctness and elegance. We must be correct concerning facts; and we ought to be elegant on that, which is already elegant. The book, which is now before us, is not only destitute of every such principle and rule, but exhibits to us the most ludicrous and striking carricature of the grace and dignity of a well-formed work. the turgid answers for the sublime; modern sentimental conceit for natural and unaffected passion; and hard words for peculiar ideas, the Pennsylvanian will be thought a good writer. We subjoin a few examples of our author's style and manner to prove the impartiality of our remarks. For the clear and perspicuous the following (so crowded with light). When An illuminated cross is suspended in the air, beneath the dome of St. Peter's; lime effects of light and shade, glittering when the symbolick refulgence creates subupon the gilded ceiling, running into ob scurity in the recesses of the chapels, dying away in the dome, and fading by degrees on the sides of the nave in the weaker and weaker reflections of diagonal radiation. P. 269. v. ii. Again. A brilliant orange, melting into a pea green of the most vivid transparency, was richly irradiated from behind a ridge of mountains upon the distant horizon, empurpled with the fairy tinge of an Italian atmosphere. P. 279. vol. ii. We cannot refrain from extracting the following sinking, mockheroick sentiment. I saw the sun go down on the crumbling walls of the villa of Adrian—and, at 10 o'clock at night, as I sit in a large room, scantily hung with the scrawls of wandering travellers, I hear the roar of the Anio, and my windows rattle with a rising blast. It reminds me, that I am alone--five thousand miles from my own fireside. The thought is serious-it stops my rambling pen. P. 248. vol. ii. But our author does not stand charged merely with having violated the laws of writing; he is still more criminal by his forgery of words. This is a crime so a trocious, that we can receive no motion for the arrest of judgment, and no petition for the extension of pardon. If the following are not words of his own formation, they are indianisms, with which we are not acquainted; from their length we should take them for the names of Indian roots. "Swamp. ed;" "insurrectionary;"«im portunacy;" "romantically;" &c. The laughable application of the following terms brings strongly to our mind the manner of a quack's "Sinister ray ;" prescription. cubick cottages ;"" transfixed waves;" "spiral protuberances ;" "monotony of silence ;"" hillocks of the Appenines;"" rainbow of a nave;"❝inimitable taste of time." From the advertisement of the book we should be led to think, that Mr. S. was some great political and literary personage, and that he intends again to appear to the publick in letters on England and France. But we warmly advise the Pennslvanian to retire "to the woodlands of Mr. Hamilton," his Macenas, where, "through the loopholes of retreat," he may see the swollen and dropsical carcass of his work heaped on the funeral pile of corrupt literature, ART. 5. The life of Samuel Johnson, D. D. the first president of King's college, Newyork. Containing many interesting anecdotes; a general view of the state of religion and learning in Connecticut, during the former part of the last century and an account of the institution and rise of Yale college, Connec◄ ticut ; and of King's (now Columbia) college, Newyork. By Thomas B, Chandler, D.D.formerly rector of St. John's church, Elizabethtown, N, J. To which is added, an appendix, containing many original letters to Dr. John. New York. Swords, 1805. 12mo. pp. 208. son. CALLIMACHUS, the learned liking of Egypt, considered by all brarian of Ptolemy Philadelphus, antiquity as the prince of elegiack poets, judged of a book from its size and the number of its pages ac◄ cording to the following rule, which he deemed infallible...that the larger a book, the more nonsense it contained. The author of the work before us, penetrated no doubt with the most perfect conviction of the truth of the opinion of Callimachus, has taken a most commendable precaution, and by making his volume of a very mod◄ erate size, discovered great defer ence for the opinion of the publick. We think that Dr. Chandler deserves no common praise for making the life of Dr. Johnson to consist of only one hundred and fifty-five pages, and the appendix, containing letters to Dr. Johnson Secker, bishop Lowth, and others, from bishop Berkeley, archbishop of fifty-three pages, in these bad times, when the literary world seems to be threatened with being overwhelmed by the number and and size of the volumes which continually issue from the press, called lives, memoirs, the correspondence, &c. &c. of men and women, boys and girls, philosophers and fools. The object of modern biographers seems to be only to make of their heroes giants-; stretching them out, to the very "crack of doom," over an insufferable number of pages. Such, in fact, has been the daring and extensive manufacture of books of this kind in England, and such the alarming and inordinate consumption of paper, that an ingenious mechanick, by the name of Neckinger, has lately erected a mill at Camberwell for the reproduction of this valuable article, Dr. Samuel Johnson was born of respectable parents at Guilford, in Connecticut, the 14th October, 1696. His great-grand-father Robert, came from Kingston upon Hull, in Yorkshire, and was one of the first settlers of New-Haven, about the year 1637, and is said to have been of the same family with Johnson, the associate of Robert Brown, the father of the Brownists. Samuel Johnson, the subject of this memoir, early discovered an unconquerable desire for the acquisition of knowledge, and in his eleventh year was sent to the school at Guilford, to prepare him. self for the college then at Say. brook, which he entered at fourteen, and received a degree of bachelor of arts in 1714. In the succeeding year, much discontent was excited among the scholars at the college at Saybrook, in consequence of the ignorance and total incapacity of the governours to af ford them any useful instruction, and the scholars, in rapid succes sion, abandoned the collège, Those, belonging to the towns on Connecticut river, associated under the di rection of Messrs. Woodbridge and Buckingham, ministers of Hartford, who were trustees of the college, and who, desirous of obtaining a removal of the college from Saybrook to Weathersfield, in their own neighbourhood, induced Messrs. Williams and Smith to establish a collegiate school at Weathersfield, to which the young gentlemen, above alluded to, immediately resorted. Those, who belonged to the towns on the seashore, put themselves under the tuition of Mr. Johnson at Guilford. This academical schism called loudly for legislative interference, and accordingly, when the general court convened in October, 1716, an act was passed for establishing the college in New-Haven, and Mr. Johnson was unanimously chosen one of the tutors, where he resided but a short time. The disaffection of the scholars to their instructers at Saybrook, their consequent dispersion, the dissentions between the two parties at Weathersfield and New-Haven, which occasioned for some time much disturbance in the colony, and the final compromise, which ended in the peaceful establishment of the college at New-Haven, are minutely detailed by Dr. Chandler, and constitute an interesting part of the work before us. We have thus seen, at Saybrook, the evils arising in consequence of placing boys under the direction of unskilful, inefficient instructers, the rebellion there excited, and the dissolution of the college. Even in our days we experience the mournful consequences of the insufficiency of the system of education adopted in the much boasted schools, colleges, and academies of N.England. Our school-masters, preceptors, and tutors, are too frequently incompetent to discharge |