which they are regarded; yet I am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy. to their treachery and hard-heartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families of their Protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English Patriots, who sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil war under the first Charles, be paralleled with the French Revolution! In the former the chalice overflowed from excess of Principle, in the latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former was a civil war between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties, the latter between the vices. The Venetian Glass of the French Monarchy, shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.

Septr. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the Poet, who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk with him, as we were obliged to drop all our pearls into a huge eartrumpet. From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters (I hope the German Literati in general may resemble this first specimen) I heard a tolerable Italian Pun and an interesting Anecdote. When Buonaparte was in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said, in a loud and vehement tone, in a public company"'tis a true proverb, Gli Italiani tutti Ladroni (i. e. the Italians ail Plunderers). A Lady had the courage to reply, "Non tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a good part, or Buonaparte). This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good things that might have been said. The Anecdote is more valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation. HосHE had received much information concerning the face of the Country, from a Map of unusual fullness and accuracy, the Maker of which, he heard, resided at Dusseldorf. At the storming of Dusseldorf by the French army, HoCHE previously ordered, that the house and property of this Man should be preserved, and entrusted the performance of the order to an Officer on whose Troop he could rely. Finding afterwards that the Man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "He had no reason to flee! it is for such Men, not against them, that

the French Nation makes war and consents to shed the blood of its' Children." You remember Milton's Sonnet

"The great Emathion conqueror bid spare

The house of Pindarus when temple and tower
Went to the ground".

Now though the Dusseldorf Map-maker may stand in the same relation to the Theban Bard as the snail that marks its' path by lines of film on the wall it creeps over, to the Eagle that soars sun-ward and beats the tempest with its' wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin of France may not be as valiant a General and as good a Politician as the Madman of Macedon.

From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my Friend and me to his own house, where I saw a fine Bust of his Brother. There was a solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance which corresponded to my preconceptions of his style and genius.-I saw there, likewise, a very fine Portrait of Lessing, whose Works are at present the chief object of my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if any thing, rather larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his noseO what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility! There appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness, in the Forehead -The whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of the Ideal World, i. e. in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you, that I wrote these very words in my Memorandum Book with the portrait before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and that he was a German Writer of eminence.

We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'Hote. "PATIENCE at a German Ordinary, Smiling at Time." The Germans are the worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle of common wine-Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the opulent during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the Servants hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's they came in this order, Burgundy-Madeira-Port-Frontiniac-Pacchiaretti-Old Hock-Mountain-Champagne-Hock again

-Bishop, and lastly, Punch. A tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the Ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork (for all the larger dishes are brought in cut up and first handed round and then set on the table) with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates of Apples, reminded me of Shakespeare* and Shakespeare put it in my head to go to the French Comedy. Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English Plays! The first Act informed me, that a Court Martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his Brother-in-law. The Officers plead in his behalf-in vain! His wife, the Colonel's Sister, pleads with most tempestuous agonies-in vain! She falls into hysterics and faints away, to the dropping of the inner Curtain! Inthe second act sentence of death is passed on the Count- his wife, as frantic and hysterical as before more so (good industrious creature!) she could not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic indeed! the Soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually dropped, when Reprieve! Reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes: and in comes Prince somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still frantic, only with Joy; That was all! O dear Lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed by melancholy: for such is the kind of Drama, which is now substituted every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer violence to my own feelings in joining these names; but however meanly I may think of the French serious Drama, even in it's most perfect specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion still, however, the French Tragedies are consistent works of art, and the Offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own, though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the Spectators to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The Soul is not stupefied into mere sensations, by a worthless sympathy with our own ordinary sufferings, or an empty

* "Slender. 1 bruised my shin with playing with sword and dagger r a dish of stewed prunes, and by my troth I cannot abide the smell of hot me it since." So again, Evans. "I will make an end of my dinner: there's Pippins and Cheese yet to come."

curiosity for the Surprising, undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the imaginatio n What (I would ask of the Crowd, that press forward to the pantomimic Tragedies and weeping Comedies of Kotzebue and his Imitators) what are you seeking? Is it Comedy? But in the comedy of Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with my laughter. For though the qualities which these Writers pourtray are ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitly ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own heart, or at least to whole Classes of my fellow-creatures. How often are not the Moralist and the Metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action to quotations not only from the tragic characters but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the Fools and Clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast and Hypocrite of Moliere. Say not that I am recommending abstractions, for these Class-characteristics which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each Person of the Shakespearian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential properties of Geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence, and (if I may mention his name without pedantry to a Lady) Aristotle has accordingly required of the Poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief differences are, that in Geometry it is the universal truth which is uppermost in the consciousness, in Poetry the individual form in which it is cloathed. With the Ancient and not less with the elder Dramatists of England and France, both Comedy and Tragedy were considered as kinds of Poetry. They neither sought in Comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the cloathing of common-place morals in metaphors drawn from the Shops or mechanic occupations of their Characters. Nor did they condescend in Tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the Specta tors, by representing before them fac-similies of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on

their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of our Understanding and Imagination. They wished to transport the mind to a sense of it's possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless " thing, we are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.

Hold! (methinks I hear the Spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will listen to him. I am the Plaintiff, and be He the Defendant.)

DEFENDANT. Hold! Are not our modern sentimental Plays filled with the best Christian morality?

PLAINTIFF. Yes ! just as much of it, and just that part of it which you can exercise without a single christian virtue-without a single sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and generosity; Adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble it out of a common trough. No Cæsar must pace your boards-no Antony, no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache?

D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain Citizen of London, or Hamburg, to do with your Kings and Queens, and your old school-boy Pagan Heroes ? besides, every body knows the stories : and what curiosity can we feel

P. What, Sir, not for the manner? not for the delightful language of the Poet? not for the situations, the action and reaction of the passions?

D. You are hasty, Sir, the only curiosity we feel is in the story, and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a Play, or be surprized by it, when we know how it will

turn out.

P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now