das, of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety.

Aristotle, whose industry composed more than four hundred volumes, has not been less spared by the critics; Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, and Plutarch, have forgotten nothing that can tend to show his ignorance, his ambition, and hs vanity.

It has been said, that Plato was so envious of the celebrity of Democritus, that he proposed burning all his works but that Amydis and Clinias prevented it, by remonstrating that there were copies of them every where; and Arstotle was agitated by the same passion against all the philosophers his predecessors!

Virgil is destitute of invention, if we are to give credit to Pliny Carbilius, and Seneca. Caligula has absolutely denied him even mediocrity; Herennus has marked his faults; and Perilius Faustinus has furnished a thick vol, with his plagiarisms. Even the author of his apology has confessed that he has stolen from Homer his greatest beauties; from Apollonius Rhodius, many of his pathetic passages; from Nicander, hints from his Georgics; and this does not terminate the catalogue.

Horace censures the coarse humour of Plautus; and Horace, in his turn, has been blamed for the free use he made of the Greek minor poets.

The majority of the critics regard Pliny's Natural History only as a heap of fables; and seem to have quite as little respect for Quintus Curtius, who indeed seems to have composed little more than an elegant romance.

Pliny cannot bear Diodorus and Vopiscus; and in one comprehensive criticism, treats all the historians as narrators of fables.

Livy has been reproached for his aversion to the Gauls; Dion, for his hatred of the republic; Velleius Paterculus, for speaking too kindly of the vices of Tiberius; and Herodotus and Plutarch, for their excessive partiality to their own country; while the latter has written an entire treatise on the malignity of Herodotus. Xenophon and Quintus Curtius have been considered rather as novelists than historians; and Tacitus has been censured for his audacity in pretending to discover the political springs and secret causes of events. Dionysius of Halicarnassus has made an elaborate attack on Thucydides for the unskilful choice of his subjects and his manner of treating it. Dionysius would have nothing written but what tended to the glory of his country and the pleasure of the reader; as if history were a song! adds Hobbes: while he also shows that there was a personal motive in this attack. The same Dionysius severely criticises the style of Xenophon, who, he says, whenever he attempts to elevate his style shows he is incapable of supporting it. Polybius has been blamed for his frequent introduction of moral reflections, which interrupt the thread of his narrative: and Sallust has been blamed by Cato for indulging his own private passions, and studiously concealing many of the glorious actions of Cicero. The Jewish historian Josephus is accused of not having designed his history for his own people so much as for the Greeks and Romans, whom he takes the utmost care never to offend. Josephus assumes a Roman name, Flavius; and considering his nation as entirely subjugated, he only varies his story to make them appear venerable and dignified to their conquerors, and for this purpose, alters what he himself calls the Holy books. It is well known how widely he differs from the scriptural accounts. Some have said of Cicero, that there is no connexion, and, to adopt their own figures, no blood and nerves, in what his admirers so warmly extol. Cold in his extemporaneous effusions, artificial in his exordiums, trifling in his strained railery, and tiresome in his digressions. This is saying a good deal about Cicero!

Quintilian does not spare Seneca; and Demosthenes called by Cicero the prince of orators, has, according to Hermippus, more of art than of nature. To Demades, his orations appear too much laboured; others have thought him too dry; and, if we may trust Eschines, his language is by no means pure.

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius and the Deipnosophists of Athenæus, while they have been extolled by one party, have been degraded by another. They have been considered as botchers of rags and remmants; their diligence has not been accompanied by judgment; and their taste inclined more to the frivolous than to the useful. Compilers, indeed, are liable to a hard fate, for little distinction is made in their ranks; a disagreeable situation, in which honest Burton seems to have been placed; for he

says of his work, that some will cry out, This is a thinge of mere industrie: a collection without wit or invention; a very toy! So men are valued! their labours vilified by fellows of no worth themselves, as things of naught; who could not have done as much. Some understande too little, and some too much.'

Should we proceed with the list to our own country, and to our own times, it might be currently augmented, and show the world what men the critics are! but, perhaps, enough has been said to sooth irritated genius, and to shame fastidious criticism. I would beg the critics to remember,' the Earl of Roscommon writes, in his preface to Horace's Art of Poetry, that Horace owed his favour and his fortune to the character given of him by Virgil and Varius; that Fundanius and Pollio, are still valued by what Horace says of them; and that in their golden age, there was a good understanding among the ingenious, and those who were the most esteemed were the best natured.'

THE PERSECUTED LEARNED.

For my

Those who have laboured most zealously to instruct mankind, have been those who have suffered most from ignorance; and the discoverers of new arts and sciences have hardly ever lived to see them accepted by the world. With a noble perception of his own genius, Lord Bacon, in his prophetic will, thus expresses himself. name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.' Before the times of Galileo and Harvey, the world believed in the stagnation of the blood, and the diurnal immovability of the earth; and for denying these the one was persecuted and the other ridiculed.

The intelligence and the virtue of Socrates were punished with death. Anaxagoras, when he attempted to propagate a just notion of the Supreme Being, was dragged to prison. Aristotle, after a long series of persecution, swallowed poison. Heraclitus, tormented by his countrymen, broke off all intercourse with men. The great geometri cians and chemists, as Gerbert, Roger Bacon, and others, were abhorred as magicians. Pope Gerbert, as Bishop Otho gravely relates, obtained the pontificate by having given himself up entirely to the devil: others suspected him too of holding an intercourse with demons; but this was indeed a devilish age.

Virgilius, Bishop of Saltzburg, having asserted that there existed antipodes, the archbishop of Mentz declared him a heretic, and consigned him to the flames: and the Abbot Trithemius, who was fond of improving steganography, or the art of secret writing, having published several curious works on this subject, they were condemned, as works fult of diabolical mysteries; and Frederick II, Elector Palatine, ordered Trithemius's original work, which was in his library, to be publicly burnt.

Galileo was condemned at Rome publicly to disavow sen. timents, the truth of which must have been to him abundantly manifest. Are these then my judges?' he exclaimed in retiring from the inquisitors, whose ignorance astonished him. He was imprisoned, and visited by Milton, who tells us he was then poor and old. The confessor of his widow, taking advantage of her piety, perused the Mss of this great philosopher, and destroyed such as in his judgment, were not fit to be known to the world!

Gabriel Naude, in his apology for those great men who have been accused of magic, has recorded a melancholy number of the most eminent scholars, who have found, that to have been successful in their studies was a success which harassed them with continued persecution, a prison, or a grave.

Cornelius Agrippa was compelled to fly his country, and the enjoyment of a large income, merely for having displayed a few philosophical experiments, which now every school-boy can perform; but more particularly having attacked the then prevailing opinion, that St Anne had three husbands, he was so violently persecuted, that he was obliged to fly from place to place. The people beheld him as an object of horror; and not unfrequently, when he walked, he found the streets empty at his approach. He died in an hospital.

In these times, it was a common opinion to suspect every great man of an intercourse with some familiar spirit, The favourite black dog of Agrippa was supposed to be a demon. When Urban Grandier, another victim to the age, was led to the stake, a large fly settled on his head : a monk, who had heard that Beelzebub signifies in Hebrew, the God of Flies, reported that he saw this spirit come to

The Marquis of Worcester, in a petition to parliament, in the reign of Charles II, offered to publish the hundred processes and machines, enumerated in his very curious Cenentary of Inventions,' on condition that money should be granted to extricate him from the difficulties in which he had involved himself, by the prosecution of useful discoveries. The petition does not appear to have been attended to! Many of these admirable inventions were lost. The steam engine and the telegraph may be traced among them.

so much as sixteen or eighteen hours in these enlarging lexicons and Polyglot Bibles.'

Le Sage resided in a little cottage while he supplied the world with their most agreeable novels, and appears to have derived the sources of his existence in his old age from the filial exertions of an excellent son, who was an actor of some genius. I wish, however, that every man of letters could apply to himself the epitaph of this delightful writer :

Sous ce tombeau git Le Sage abattu,
Par le ciseau de la Parque importune;
S'il ne fut pas ami de la fortune,

Il fut toujours ami de la vertu.

of our own country; the catalogue is very incomplete, but far too numerous.

IMPRISONMENT OF THE LEARNED. Imprisonment has not always disturbed the man of letters in the progress of his studies, but often unquestionably has greatly promoted them.

In prison Boethius composed his work on the Consola

Simon Ockley, a learned student in Oriental literature, addresses a letter to the same earl, in which he paints his distresses in glowing colours. After having devoted his life to Asiatic researches, then very uncommon, he had the mortification of dating his preface to his great work from Cambridge Castle, where he was confined for debt; and, with an air of triumph, feels a martyr's enthusiasm in the cause in which he perishes.

He published his first volume of the History of the Saracens, in 1708; and ardently pursuing his oriental studies, published his second volume ten years afterwards without any patronage. Alluding to the encouragement necessary to bestow on youth, to remove the obstacles to such studies, he observes, that young men will hardly come in on the prospect of finding leisure, in a prison, to transcribe those papers for the press, which they have collected with indefatigable labour, and oftentimes at the expense of their rest, and all the other conveniences of life, for the service of the public. No, though I were to assure them from my own experience, that I have enjoyed more true liberty,

more happy leisure, and more solid repose, in six months

here, than in thrice the same number of years before. Evil is the condition of that historian who undertakes to write the lives of others, before he knows how to live himself! Not that I speak thus as if I thought I had any just cause to be angry with the world-I did always in my judgment give the possession of wisdom the preference to that of riches!

Spenser, the child of Fancy, languished out his life in misery. Lord Burleigh,' says Granger, who it is said prevented the queen giving him a hundred pounds, seems to have thought the lowest clerk in his office a more deserving person.' Mr Malone attempts to show that Spenser had a small pension; but the poet's querulous verses must not be forgotten

Full little knowest thou, that hast not try'd 'What Hell it is, in suing long to bide.'

To lose good days-to waste long nights-and as he feelingly exclaims,

To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, To speed, to give, to want, to be undone !' How affecting is the death of Sydenham, who had devoted his life to a laborious version of Plato. He died in a spunging-house, and it was his death which appears to have given rise to the Literary Fund for the relief of distressed authors.'

Who shall pursue important labours when they read these anecdotes? Dr Edmund Castell spent a great part of his life in compiling his Lexicon Heptaglotton, on which he bestowed incredible pains, and expended on it no less than 12,000., and broke his constitution, and exhausted his fortune. At length it was printed, but the copies remained unsold on his hands. He exhibits a curious picture of literary labour in his preface. As for myself, I have been unceasingly occupied for such a number of years in this mass,' Molendino he calls them, 'that that day seemed, as it were, a holiday in which I have not laboured

on Saint Matthew, with other works: the detail of his allotment of time to different studies, during his confinement, is very instructive.

Buchanan in the dungeon of a monastery in Portugal, composed his excellent Paraphrases of the Psalms of David. Cervantes composed the most agreeable book in the Spanish language during his captivity in Barbary.

Fleta, a well known law production, was written by a person confined in the Fleet for debt; the name of the place, though not that of the author, has thus been preserved; and another work, Fieta Minor, or the Laws of Art and Nature in knowing the Bodies of Metals, &c., by Sir John Pettus, 1683;' who gave it this title from the circumstance of his having translated it from the German during his confinement in this prison.

Louis the Twelfth, when the Duke of Orleans, was long imprisoned in the Tower of Bourges, applying himself to his studies, which he had hitherto neglected; he became, in consequence, an enlightened monarch.

Margaret, queen of Henry the Fourth, king of France, confined in the Louvre, pursued very warmly the studies of elegant literature, and composed a very skilful apology for the irregularities of her conduct.

Charles the First, during his cruel confinement at Holms

by, wrote the Eikon Basilike, the Royal Image,' address ed to his son; this work has, however, been attributed by his enemies to Dr Gauden, who was incapable of writing the book, though not of disowning it.

Queen Elizabeth, while confined by her sister Mary, wrote several poems, which we do not find she ever could equal after her enlargement; and it is said Mary Queen of Scots, during her long imprisonment by Elizabeth, produced many pleasing poetic compositions.

Sir Walter Rawleigh's unfinished History of the World, which leaves us to regret that later ages had not been cele brated by his sublime eloquence, was the fruits of eleven years of imprisonment. It was written for the use of Prince Henry, as he and Dailington, who also wrote 'Aphorisms' for the same prince, have told us; the prince looked over the manuscript. Of Rawleigh it is observed, to employ the language of Hume, They were struck with the extensive genius of the man, who, being educated amidst naval and military enterprises, had surpassed, in the pursuits of literature, even those of the most recluse and sedentary lives; and they admired his unbroken magnanimity which at his age, and under his circumstances, coula engage him to undertake and execute so great a work as his History of the World. He was, however, assisted in this great work by the learning of several eminent persons; a circumstance which has not been noticed.

The plan of the Henriade was sketched, and the greater part composed, by Voltaire, during his imprisonment in the Bastile; and the Pilgrim's Progress' of Bunyan was produced in a similar situation.

Howel, the author of 'Familar Letters,' wrote the chief part of them, and almost all his other works, during ais long confinement in the Fleet-prison; he employed his fertile pen for subsistence; and in all his books we find much entertainment.

Lydiat, while confined in the King's Bench, for debt, wrote his Annotations on the Parian Chronicle, which wore

first published by Prideaux. This was that learned scholar whom Johnson alludes to; an allusion not known to Boswell and others.

The learned Selden, committed to prison for his attacks on the divine right of tithes and the king's prerogative, prepared during his confinement, his history of Eadmer, enriched by his notes.

Cardinal Polignac formed the design of refuting the arguments of the sceptics which Bayle had been renewing in his dictionary; but his public occupations hindered him. Two exiles at length fortunately gave him the leisure; and the Anti-Lucretius is the fruit of the court disgraces of its author.

Freret, when imprisoned in the Bastile, was permitted only to have Bayle for his companion. His dictionary was always before him, and his principles were got by heart. To this circumstance we owe his works, animated by all the powers of scepticism.

Sir William Davenant finished his poem of Gondibert during his confinement by the rebels in Carisbroke Castle. De Foe, when imprisoned in Newgate for a political pamphlet, began his Review; a periodical paper, which has extended to nine thick volumes in quarto, and it has been supposed served as the model of the celebrated papers of Steele. There he also composed his Jure Divino. Wicquefort's curious work on Ambassadors' is dated from his prison, where he had been confined for state affairs. He softened the rigour of those heavy hours by several historical works.

in

One of the most interesting facts of this kind is the fate of an Italian scholar, of the name of Maggi. Early addicted to the study of the sciences, and particularly to the mathematics and military architecture, he defended Famagusta, besieged by the Turks, by inventing machines which destroyed their works. When that city was taken in 1571, they pillaged his library, and carried him away chains. Now a slave, after his daily labours he amused a great part of his nights by literary compositions; 'De Tintinnabulis,' on Bells, a treatise still read by the curious, was actually composed by him when a slave in Turkey, without any other resource than the erudition of his own memory, and the genius of which adversity could not deprive him.

AMUSEMENTS OF THE LEARNED.

Among the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation however trifling. When Petavius was employed in his Dogmata Theologica, a work of the most profound and extensive erudition, the great recreation of the learned father was at the end of every second hour to twirl his chair for five minutes. After protracted studies Spinosa would mix with the family-party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other; he observed their combats with so much interest that he was often seized with immoderate fits of laughter. A continuity of labour deadens the soul, observes Seneca, in closing his treatise on The Tranquillity of the Soul,' and the mind must unhend itself by certain amusements. Socrates did not blush to play with children; Cato, over his bottle, found an alleviation from the fatigues of government; a circumstance, he says in his manner, which rather gives honour to this defect, than the defect dishonours Cato. Some men of letters portioned out their day between repose and labour. Asinius Pollio would not suffer any business to occupy him beyond a stated hour; after that time he would not allow any letter to be opened during his hours of relaxation, that they might not be interrupted by unforeseen labours. In the senate, after the tenth hour, it was not allowed to make any new motion.

Tycho Brahe diverted himself with polishing glasses for all kinds of spectacles, and making mathematical instruments; an amusement too closely connected with his studies to be deemed as one.

D'Andilly, the translator of Josephus, after seven or eight hours of study every day, amused himself in cultivating trees; Barclay, the author of the Argenis, in his leisure hours was a florist; Balsac amused himself with a collection of crayon portraits; Peiresc found his amusement amongst his medals and antiquarian curiosities; the Abbé de Maroles with his prints; and Politian in singing airs to his lute. Descartes passed his afternoons in the conversation of a few friends, and in cultivating a little garden in the morning, occupied by the system of the world e

relaxed his profound speculations by rearing delica flowers.

Conrad ab Uffenbach, a learned German, recreated his mind, after severe studies, with a collection of prints o eminent persons, methodically arranged; he retained this ardour of the Grangerite to his last days.

Rohault wandered from shop to shop to observe the mechanics labour; Count Caylus passed his mornings in the Rudtos of artists, and his evenings in writing his numerous works on art. This was the true life of an amateur.

Granville Sharp, amidst the severities of his studies, found a social relaxation in the amusement of a barge on the Thames, which was well known to the circle of his friends; there, was festive hospitality with musical delight. It was resorted to by men of the most eminent talents and rank. His little voyages to Putney, to Kew, and to Richmond, and the literary intercourse they produced, were singularly happy ones. The history of his amusements cannot be told without adding to the dignity of his character,' observes Mr Prince Hoare, in the very curious life of this great philanthropist.

Some have found amusement in composing treatises on odd subjects. Seneca wrote a burlesque narrative of Claudian's death. Pierious Valerianus has written an eulogium on beards; and we have had a learned one recently, with due gravity and pleasantry, entitled 'Eloge de Perruques.'

Holstein has written an eulogium on the North Wind ; Heinsius, on the Ass;' Menage, the Transmigration of the Parasitical Pedant to a Parrot; and also the Petition of the Dictionaries.'

Erasmus composed, to amuse himself when travelling in a post-chaise, his panegyric on Moria, or Folly; which, authorized by the pun, he dedicated to Sir Thomas More.

Sallengre, who would amuse himself like Erasmus, wrote, in imitation of his work, a panegyric on Ebriety. He says, that he is willing to be thought as drunken a man as Erasmus was a foolish one. Synesius composed a Greek panegyric on Baldness; these burlesques were brought into great vogue by Erasmus's More Encomium. It seems, Johnson observes in his life of Sir Thomas Browne, to have been in all ages the pride of art to show how it could exalt the low and amplify the little. To this ambition perhaps we owe the frogs of Homer; the gnat and the bees of Virgil; the butterfly of Spenser; the shadows of Wowerus; and the quincunx of Browne.

Cardinal de Richelieu, amongst all his great occupations, found a recreation in violent exercises; and he was once discovered jumping with his servant, to try who could reach the highest side of a wall. De Grammont, observing the cardinal to be jealous of his powers, offered to jump with him; and in the true spirit of a courtier, having made some efforts which nearly reached the cardinal's, confessed the cardinal surpassed him. This was jumping like a politician; and by this means he is said to have ingratiated himself with the minister.

The great Samuel Clarke was fond of robust exercise; and this profound logician has been found leaping over tables and chairs: once perceiving a pedantic fellow, he said, 'Now we must desist, for a fool is coming in.'

What ridiculous amusements passed between Dean Swift and his friends, in Ireland, some of his prodigal editors have revealed to the public. He seems to have outlived the relish of fame, when he could level his mind to such perpetual trifles.

An eminent French lawyer, confined by his business to a Parisian life, amused himself with collecting from the clas sics all the passages which relate to a country life. The collection was published after his death.

Contemplative men seem to be fond of amusements which accord with their habits. The thoughtful game of chess, and the tranquil delight of angling, have been favourite recreations with the studious. Paley had himself painted with a rod and line in his hand; a strange characteristic for the author of Natural Theology. Sir Henry Wotton called angling idle time not idle spent ;' we may suppose that his meditations and his amusements were carried on at the same moment.'

The amusements of the great Daguesseau, chancellor of France, consisted in an interchange of studies: his re laxations were all the varieties of literature. 'Le change ment de l'étude est mon seul delassement,' said this grea man; and Thomas observes, that in the age of the pas sions, his only passion was study.'

Seneca has observed on amusements proper for literary

men, in regard to robust exercises, that these are a folly, and indecency to see a man of letters exult in the strength of his arm, or the breadth of his back! such amusements diminish the activity of the mind. Too much fatigue exhausts the animal spirits, as too much food blunts the finer faculties; but elsewhere he allows his philosopher an occasional slight inebriation; an amusement which was very prevalent among our poets formerly, when they exclaimed,

Fetch me Ben Jonson's skull, and fil't with sack,
Rich as the same he drank, when the whole pack
Of jolly sisters pledged, and did agree

It was no sin to be as drunk as he! Seneca concludes admirably, 'whatever be the amusements you choose, return not slowly from those of the body to the mind; exercise the latter night and day. The mind is nourished at a cheap rate; neither cold nor heat, nor age itself can interrupt this exercise; give therefore all your cares to a possession which ameliorates even in its old age!

An ingenious writer has observed, that a garden just accommodates itself to the perambulations of a scholar, who would perhaps rather wish his walks abridged than extended.' There is a good characteristic account of the mode in which the literati take exercise in Pope's letters. I, like a poor squirrel, am continually in motion indeed, but it is about a cage of three foot; my little excursions are like those of a shopkeeper, who walks every day a mile or two before his own door, but minds his business all the while.' A turn or two in a garden will often very happily close a fine period, mature an unripened thought, and raise up fresh associations, when the mind like the body becomes rigid by preserving the same posture. Buffon often quitted the apartment he studied in, which was placed in the midst of his garden, for a walk in it; Evelyn loved 'books and a garden.'

PORTRAITS OF AUTHORS.

With the ancients, it was undoubtedly a custom to place the portraits of authors before their works. Martial's 186th epigram of his fourteenth book in a mere play on words, concerning a little volume containing the works of Virgil, and which had his portrait prefixed to it. The volume and the characters must have been very diminutive.

'Quam brevis immensum cepit membrana Maronem!
'Ipsius Vultus prima tabella gerit.'

Martial is not the only writer who takes notice of the ancients prefixing portraits to the works of authors. Seneca, in his ninth chapter on the Tranquillity of the Soul, complains of many of the luxurious great, who, like so many of our own collectors, possessed libraries as they did their estate and equipages. It is melancholy to observe how the portraits of men of genius, and the works of their divine intelligence, are used only as the luxury and the ornaments of walls.'

Pliny has nearly the same observation, Lib. xxxv, cap. 2. He remarks, that the custom was rather modern in his time; and attributes to Asinius Pollio the honour of having introduced it into Rome. In consecrating a library with the portraits of our illustrious authors, he has formed, if I may so express myself, a republic of the intellectual powers of men.' To the richness of book-treasures, Assinius Pollio had associated a new source of pleasure, in placing the statues of their authors amidst them, inspiring the minds of the spectators even by their eyes.

A taste for collecting portraits, or busts, was warmly pursued in the happier periods of Rome; for the celebrated Atticus, in a work he published of illustrious Romans, made it more delightful, by ornamenting it with the portraits of those great men; and the learned Varro, in his biography of Seven Hundred celebrated Men, by giving the world their true features and their physiognomy, in some manner, aliquo modu imaginibus is Pliny's expression, showed that even their persons should not entirely be annihilated, they indeed,adds Pliny, form a spectacle which the gods themselves might contemplate; for if the gods sent those heroes to the earth, it is Varro who secured their immortality, and has so multiplied and distributed them in all places, that we may carry them about us, place them wherever we choose, and fix our eyes on them with perpetual admiration. A spectacle that every day becomes more varied and interesting, as new heroes appear, and as works of this kind are spread abroad.

But as printing was unknown to the ancients (though

stamping an impression was daily practised, and in fact, they possessed the art of printing without being aware of it) how were these portraits of Varro so easily propagated? If copied with a pen, their correctness was in some danger, and their diffusion must have been very confined and slow; perhaps they were outlines. This passage of Pliny's excites curiosity, which it may be difficult to satisfy.

Amongst the various advantages which attend a collection of portraits of illustrious characters, Oldys observes, that they not only serve as matters of entertainment and curiosity, and preserve the different modes or habits of the fashions of the time, but become of infinite importance, by settling our floating ideas upon the true features of famous persons: they fix the chronological particulars of their birth age, death, sometimes with short characters of them, besides the names of painter, designer, and engraver. It is thus a single print, by the hand of a skilful artist, may become a varied banquet. To this Granger adds, that in a collection of engraved portraits, the contents of many galleries are reduced into the narrow compass of a few volumes; and the portraits of eminent persons, who distinguished themselves for a long succession of ages, may be

turned over in a few hours.

'Another advantage, Granger continues, 'attending such an assemblage is, that the methodical arrangement has a surprising effect upon the memory. We see the celebrated contemporaries of every age almost at one view; and the mind is insensibly led to the history of that period. I may add to these, an important circumstance, which is the power that such a collection will have in awakening genius. A skilful preceptor will presently perceive the true bent of the temper of his pupil, by his being struck with a Blake or a Boyle, a Hyde or a Mil

ton.

A circumstance in the life of Cicero confirms this observation. Atticus had a gallery adorned with the images of portraits of the great men of Rome, under each of which Cornelius Nepos says, he had severally described their principal acts and honours in a few concise verses of his own composition. It was by the contemplation of two of these portraits (Old Brutus and a venerable relative in one picture) that Cicero seems to have incited Brutus by the example of these his great ancestors,to dissolve the tyranny of Cæsar. Fairfax made a collection of engraved portraits of warriors. A story much in favour of portrait-col lectors is that of the Athenian courtezan, who, in the midst of a riotous banquet with her lovers, accidentally casting her eye on the portrait of a philosopher that hung opposite to her seat, the happy character of temperance and virtue struck her with so lively an image of her own unworthiness, that she instantly quitted the room, and retired for ever from the scene of debauchery. The orientalists have felt the same charm in their pictured memorial; for 'the im perial Akber,' says Mr Forbes, in his Oriental Memoirs, employed artists to make portraits of all the principal omrahs and officers in his court; they were bound together in a thick volume, wherein, as the Aveen Akbery or the Institutes of Akber express it, The Past are kept in lively remembrance: and the Present are insured immortality.'

Leonard Aretin, when young and in prison, found a por trait of Petrarch, on which his eyes were perpetually fixed; and this sort of contemplation inflamed the desire of imitating this great man: Buffon hung the portrait of Newton before his writing-table.

On this subject, how sublimely Tacitus expresses himself at the close of his admired biography of Agricola. 'I do not mean to censure the custom of preserving in brass or marble, the shape and stature of eminent men; but busts and statues, like their originals, are frail and perishable. The soul is formed of finer elements, its inward form is not to be expressed by the hand of an artist with unconscious matter; our manners and our morals may in some degree trace the resemblance. All of Agricola that gained our love and raised our admiration still subsists, and ever will subsist, preserved in the minds of men, the register of ages and the records of fame.'

What is more agreeable to the curiosity of the mind and the eve than portraits of great characters? An old philos opher whom Marville invited to see a collection of landscapes by a celebrated artist, replied, 'landscapes I prefer seeing in the country itself, but I am fond of contemplating the pictures of illustrious men.' This opinion has some truth: Lord Orford preferring an interesting portrait, to either landscape or historical painting. A landscape.