prevents our mistaking between those which are essential and those which are contributive: that, where there are saving and commendable parts of a work, from this view which it gives us of all the qualities of excellence, it prevents our pronouncing a general condemnation; a common fault of vulgar critics, who build on one merit, to the ruin of every other; and the source of that beggarly sentence pronounced by Voltaire on our immortal Shakespeare.

No 78. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9.

'A

yap αυτα λυπηρως δρωμεν, τουτών τας είκονας τας μαλιστα ηκριβωμενας, χαιρομεν θεωρούντες. ΑΡΙΣΤ. περι Ποιητ. κεφ. δ.

We are delighted with accurate imitations even of those originals which give us pain in the contemplation.

THE other night, the conversation at the club turned principally upon the different styles of composition which the fashionable writers of the present moment have adopted with most success. A gentleman present, who is a little too loud against modern literature, but who supports his opinions with a great deal of sound and judicious reasoning on the subject, sent me, the next morning, two very ludicrous specimens, in imitation of a favourite historian and a favourite biographer; and as they are both by the same hand, I have copied them both for my paper of today.

Specimen of an intended History of England, by the Author of a History of the Decline of the Roman Empire, representing the Life of the illustrious Son of Waldron.

"Now went forth the spirit of plunder. The gigantic forms of depredation, which at this time sub

jected the persons and pockets of the metropolis to the hands and hangers of the marauder, naturally rivets our attention to the exploits of the son of Henry Waldron, in whom, under the wily alias of George Barrington, I darkly contemplate the father of that species of clandestine rapine which disjoins the inconveniencies of robbery from its terrors, and consists in the insinuation of the finger or the hook into our personal coffers, and recovering them triumphant with the spoils of the insensible benefactor. This furtive assessment upon property does not, on a first view, appear worthy of the transcendant abilities of the freebooter of Kildare: but whatever underwent the touch of Midas became gold; and the transmuting intellect of Barrington invested with system and with science an art which had hitherto been regarded, by the more learned and more adventurous in the schools of Mercury, with contemptuous indifference, and was by them consigned to the noviciates of the lawless fraternity. Darting a keener glance into the occupation which was at once to dignify and to degrade his future day, this plunderer of the West was probably fired by those very discouragements which would have depressed a less towering altitude of genius; and discerned, through the shades of ignominy, a harvest of glory, in a proportion inverse to the fertility of the soil in which it was to be reared.

"Armed with such confidence and such ambition, now walked forth the adventurer of Ireland, sealing his ears to the syren solicitations of more honourable employs, and spurning with unhallowed contempt the proffered patronage of the pontiff of Leixlip, and the hope of histrionic eminence with which a successful appearance in the part of Jaffier had saluted his dawn. The metropolis of Hibernia was the scene of

his predatory exploits no longer than till the maturity of habit had succeeded to the crudities of unpractised timidity. The ripeness of his art co-operating with a few instances of detection, sent him, fraught with presages of victory, against the capital of Albion; and the year 1773 will be connected, through the lapse of ages, with the first appearance of the Son of Waldron on the shores of Britain. The giant capacities of genius are awake at those hours and in those situations wherein minds of a plebeian mould resign themselves to the torpors of slumber; and the tedious interval which was passed in the Dorset Yacht was made conducive to the promotion of his future hopes, by laying the faithless foundation of a felonious friendship with one of the co-partners of his voyage.

"A tale of wealth and ancestry was fabricated by our child of fortune, for the purpose of lulling suspicion into security, and conciliating doubt into confidence. The latter of these pretensions was of a nature sufficiently unsubstantial to elude the fear of detection; but as the former was to be corroborated by external evidences, and as a solitary score of guineas was the only basis on which it could, at this early epoch of his life, be erected, it became necessary to make an instantaneous appeal to his mighty abilities. His first successes held the world in awe; England trembled at the name of Barrington; and the march of the hero of Hibernia was every where marked with personal depredations. From the winter solstice to the equinox of spring, he prosecuted a series of exploits unequalled in craft and ingenuity among the sons of Adam. The walls of Ranelagh were the scene of his maiden claims upon the involuntary contributions of the public; and in the transient revolution of a single evening a Knight of the

Bath, nine Peers of the Realm, and five others of the brightest luminaries in the globe of fashion, were reduced, by the fingers of the Son of Waldron, to the necessity of inquiring the hour of the night from those of their friends in whose fobs he had still left the sources of information.

"The magic of the fœnatorial rod was not wanting for the purposes of converting his watches into wealth; and his intimacy with his fellow-voyager of the Dorset Yacht was supported with the glittering robberies of Ranelagh. But the gratitude of the depredator of Hibernia walked forth with unequal pace by the side of his emoluments. The friend of the Dorset Yacht, and the friends of this friend, and every collateral relative, were laid under contribution to the unasking necessities of the pupil of Mercury. At their nocturnal meetings, he silently contemplated his gains amid the unsuspicious joys of Bacchus; and promoted a full flow of hilarity, not as an aid to wit, or as an antidote to care, but as a soporific to suspicion, that his hand might find a facile entrance into those favourite haunts of his divinity, the pocket and the fob.

"But these subaltern modes of chicane, however they might relieve his necessities, or supply his prodigality, could by no means saturate his ambition. He was an eagle, that aspired rather to the perilous glory of a victory over the vulture, than to the safe luxury of a meal upon the dove; and the court of the British potentate was to be the scene of his proudest achievements in this field of adventure. The ecclesiastical habit, not now assumed for the first time as a skreen to the plots of the plunderer, furnished him with a passport to the presence of majesty; and a lord of the council unconsciously resigned to the felonious hand of the Hibernian the glittering ensign of