of peace and war, and gives as shrewd guesses at the success of a congress, as any one I know. I found him engaged in a pretty warm dispute with a maiden lady about the age of thirty, who had been a beauty in her time; a young officer, who was nephew to my friend, and a noted critic. Hurlothrumbo was the subject of the controversy, which the young warrior read to the company with an air and accent, that did justice to the performance.

After the usual civilities to me, upon entering the room, they resumed their dispute. The old gentleman, who is a zealous friend to the present happy establishment, both in church and state, seemed very warm. He was jealous of every line, and either saw or suspected treason in every page. There is nothing, said he, can be more evident, than that it is a treasonable and factious pamphlet, wrote to sow sedition among the people, and bespatter the ministry at least, if not to bring in the pretender. If this is not the design of the writer, why those scurrilous reflections on kings and great men, in the very first act? Why does the plot lie so deep? And why is the whole conducted in so seemingly incoherent and obscure a manner, that it is scarcely possible to understand it? What occasion for so much darkness, if all was as it should be? If it was not the spawn of a damned Popish plot, there had been no need of introducing so many familiars and devils. Why that lion overcome and killed by Hurlothrumbo? Is not a lion part of the arms of England? I do not like that lion.

In short his passion transported him so far, that he would not allow the performance had either spirit or sublimity in it, nor, in some places, even sense. He concluded with a piece of advice to his nephew, to decry it in all companies, lest he should be suspected of disaffection, and lose his post by it.

Here the officer, who is a man of taste and fire, undertook the defence of his favourite play, with as much warmth, as was decent in the support of an opinion, opposite to that of his uncle. That youthful warmth, said he, which is necessary in the reader of such a performance, is a little too much abated in you, sir, to keep pace with such writings as this. Your great attachment to our establishment hath

VOL. V.

made you watchful and apprehensive, where there are no grounds for suspicion. The introducing of demons is a thing very innocent and common in our best plays. As for the lion, he is but a lion, and I will answer for him, hath no designs upon the reader, but to please.

Having thus answered his uncle's objections, he proceeded to set forth the beauties of the play in such a strain, as shewed he entered deep into its spirit, and was sensibly touched with its masterly strokes. He commended the force and propriety of the diction, the justness of the sentiments, the sublimity of the images, the beauty and variety of the descriptions, and dwelt a long time on the inimitable art of the author, who had so artfully concealed his art, that it required infinite penetration to discover there was any art in it at all.

The critic waited a long time, with impatience, for an opportunity, to interpose his sentiments of the matter, and was, after all, obliged to interrupt the officer. He told us, he did not give his judgment on that occasion, with a design to impose it on us, because he had acquired some reputation for skill in criticism, but to give a right turn to the controversy, which, in his opinion, did not enter into the true merits.

I will readily grant, said he, that a true poetical fury enlivens the whole; yet I can never forgive an author letting loose the reins of his fancy, and indulging it in the transgression of all rule and order. A writer of any kind, should consider, that his readers have reason, as well as imagination, and while he gratifies the one, should take care not to shock the other. What is unreasonable can never be natural, and what is unnatural, can never truly please. Here gentlemen, you see no harmony, no cohesion of parts, no unity of time or place, preserved. A wilderness of similies, descriptions, digressions, transitions, tumbled in one after another upon the reader, hurry him along in such confusion, that he hath no leisure to attend to the management of the fable, the choice of the metaphors, nor the delicacy of the colourings. All is a chaos of beautiful materials, huddled together in vast confusion, from whence we sometimes hear an immoderate peal of laughter, sometimes frightful lamentations. Now we grope in a hell of darkness

and terror, and anon, have such a burst of light and blaze about us, as no human eyeball can endure. The sentiments, in short, are often extravagant, the expressions outrageous, and the fable so embarrassed with collateral, or opposite drifts, that it is impossible to keep in with his design, or preserve the thread he is twisting.

This severe censure grated most disagreeably on the ears of the officer and the lady, the latter of whom being perfectly charmed with the innumerable beauties of Hurlothrumbo, undertook its defence in a manner suitable to the good taste and sensibility of her sex.

How cold, said she, how void of feeling must be that heart, that reads without emotion, the powerful workings of the passions in this surprising play! How lofty are its flights! How musical its style! How amusing its plot! How heroic its battles! Above all, how engaging its interviews of love! There is nothing to be met with, in the whole circle of reading, that so absolutely melts one down, as the passionate parting of the king and his mistress. There is tenderness in perfection. The languishing regards, the mutual dying in each other's arms, the transporting expressions of infinite affection, are what no performance ever equalled it in, and what the icy rules about your heart (turning to the critic), will never suffer you to conceive. I sir, can never forgive your losing the man in the critic, and divesting yourself of that, which is most amiable in human nature. You measure poetry by a parcel of cold insipid rules, enough to extinguish the fire of a description, and freeze a metaphor to an icicle. You prey upon the garbage of an author, and can find no taste in the delicious dainties he dresses up for fine imaginations. You dive into an author, only as worms do into wood, where you find him unsound. You measure all things by the narrowness of your own understanding, and whatever exceeds that wretched scantling, you pronounce enormous, monstrous, mad. Books were not wrote for you, but for the world, and it is downright assurance in you to read at all. I wish, sir, you would confine yourself to a newspaper, and the almanack. I own I should have had but very little pleasure in this conversation, had it not been for the polite and ingenious defence of Hurlothrumbo, which the

gentleman (meaning the officer you may be sure) hath been so good as to favour us with.

The young gentleman made her a very handsome bow for this overture, which, however, he affected to interpret only as a mere civility.

This vigorous vindication, delivered with an earnestness and warmth, equal to its keenness, dumfounded all opposition, and to my infinite satisfaction, which I took care to intimate, carried the cause in favour of Hurlothrumbo.

And here, O reader, I met with an occasion of being thankful for that inestimable stock of wisdom, which I derive from education, upon hearing the ignorant wretch of a butler, who happened to get a part both of the play and the dispute, as he gave attendance, muttering to himself some uncouth criticisms, as well on what had passed in the company, as on the performance itself. I heard him swear by his soul, he believed the author was mad, and the whole company little better, for talking so gravely about his hare-brained rants, as he called them; adding, that Tom Clatterplate, who had been lately at London, with his master, Justice Wiseacre, assured him every body there began to suspect the author to be a madman. Astonishing stupidity! Be thou thankful also, O reader, that thou art not such a one as this butler, nor as Clatterplate, the traveller; for had not thy stars been kind to thee, thou mightest have been yet worse than them, even a scavenger. So take not the honour to thyself, but be thankful.

The rest of the play being read out, to the great entertainment and edification of us all, we spent the evening very agreeably, every one turning to, and repeating such particular passages, as happened best to hit his taste and humour.

I cannot shut up this elaborate and useful treatise, without a parallel between Lord Shaftsbury and Mr. Johnson. There is such a resemblance to justify this new trespass on the patience of my reader, that the genius of the one seems to be transfused into the other. But what seems to bring them the nearest to each other, is the Rhapsody and the Hurlothrumbo, to which two performances the reader is

desired to consider me, as alluding in the following comparison.

These two authors have, with the same boldness, ventured from the common worn path of all other writers, which can now afford nothing that is new, and notwithstanding they seem to scour the boundless regions of poeti cal and philosophical matter at random, yet tread precisely in the same path, excepting in a very few instances, which I shall point to hereafter.

I persuade myself, I have a clear and distinct idea of both their methods; and yet I find it exceedingly difficult to communicate that idea to the reader, for want of terms, which in this case ought to be very complex, and which, as the occasion is new, have not yet been provided by the learned. But, in some measure to get clear of this difficulty, let us suppose, what will probably happen among posterity, that there is a great number of writings formed exactly according to the manner and plan of each; one half of which are called Rhapsodies, after that of lord Shaftsbury, the first of that name, and the other called Hurlothrumbos, after Mr. Johnson's, as Cicero's Philippics are so called after those of Demosthenes. By which means, Rhapsody and Hurlothrumbo, become the terms of two general ideas, which ideas every intelligent reader will best form to himself, by carefully perusing the two performances; and those who cannot read may get others to do it for them.

Were it not for the different periods of their publication, so great is their resemblance to each other, that one would be apt to think they had flowed through the same pen.

There is a tragic spirit blended with the philosophy of the Rhapsody, and a philosophical, in the Hurlothrumbo; insomuch that the Rhapsody may not improperly be called an Hurlothrumbo of a Rhapsody, and the Hurlothrumbo, a Rhapsody of a tragedy. There is the same astonishing variety in both. Both breathe the same free spirit of thinking. Both surprise us after the same manner, and by the same faculty of digressing suddenly, and hurrying the reader in a moment from the sight of the first subject, in pursuit of a new one, which escapes and leaves him on the scent of a third, and so on, till a thousand, one after another are started and quitted in the same page. They both pursue their themes with infinite eagerness; but pursue them