into Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination;" read till five, visited a friend, and conversed with him till midnight; conversation turned on propriety of conduct, for which I was a strenuous advocate. ***** Here the journal of Meander was abruptly closed. I was curious to learn in what manner he employed his week of reformation. On the ́ensuing Monday he grew weary of his books; instead of mounting Pegasus, he actually strode a hack-horse, of mere mortal mould, and, in quest of diversion, commenced a journey. He was accompanied, not by the muses, but by a party of jocund travellers; and, prior to my friend's departure, the last words he was heard to say, or rather roar, were the burthen of a well-known Anacreontic, “ Dull thinking will make a man crazy.” The character and the journal of Meander scarcely need a commentary. There shall be none. I was not born in Holland, and only Dutchmen are qualified to write notes. But I will make an apostrophe. Ye tribe of Mercurialists! in the name of prudence, avoid eccentricity; expand not your fluttering pinions; trudge the foot-way path of life; dethrone Fancy, and crown Common Sense. Let each one seek and fulfil his daily task; one to his farm and another to his merchandise." ECCENTRICITIES OF GENIUS. DENNIE. "One who had gained a princely store, -A glover that sold lamb for kid." MANDEVILLE. AMONG the high privileges which we digressive writers enjoy, may be reckoned that which Don Quixote gave his horse-to choose a path, and pursue it at pleasure. In another point there is an affinity between us and that errant steed, so renowned in the volumes of Cervantic chivalry. When we begin an excursion, the Lord only knows how it will be prosecuted, or where it will end. Whim and caprice being commonly our guides, and those personages never keeping in their almanac a list of stages, we are sometimes most sadly benighted. As this is my day for similitudes, I stop not here; having so modestly compared myself and other ramblers to a quadruped, I will descend still lower into "the valley of humiliation," and liken them to an insect, which is a spider.-L Though their stock is confessedly small, they have the art of drawing out a most extended texture. Thus an essayist, conscious of the scantiness of his stores, handles a topic, as a farmer's wife manages her annual pound of bohea, in such a manner as to make it last. When I began my second speculation with some general remarks on the utility of an alliance between application and genius, I little thought that I should quit my sober task, and commence character painter. When fancy handed me a pencil and bade me sketch a likeness of Meander, I had no design to ransack his room or transcribe his diary: and lastly, when the journal was published, I tremblingly thought I had said too much, and dreaded lest my readers should complain that they were surfeited by the Farrago. But they who are even tinged with the metaphysical doctrine of ideas flowing in a train, will not be confounded, though they see one speculation rising from another, when I narrate the following incident. A friend, who had attentively gazed at the portrait of Meander, saw me the day after its exhibition. So, Mr. Delineator, cries he, must you become a dauber in caricature? One so fond of the zig-zag walk in life as you, is hardly entitled to ridicule deviation in another. I blushed; and the suffusion, like Corporal Trim's bow, spoke as plainly as a blush could speak," my man of remark, you are perfectly sage in your opinion." This trivial circumstance led me to reflect, first on my own inconsistency, and next on that of others. By exposing the rambles of genius, I virtually made proclamation for Dissipation to depart, but she taxed me with issuing contradictory orders, and pertinently asked how she could go into exile, when I insisted on her keeping me company? I then looked on my neighbours. Their characters were similar to mine, and they wore not the uniform of regularity more than myself. Celia, who murders reputations as " butcher felleth ox," pronounced, t'other day, at a teatable, a most bitter invective against scandal, though five minutes before she had invented a tale of calumny against her friend. Vinoso, whose face is as red-lettered as the court calendar, and who makes his Virginia fence at nine in the morning, applauds a very heavy excise on distilled spirits, and zealously damns every drunkard in the nation. Bobbin, the haberdasher, who, in vending a row of pins, defrauds the heedless customer of four, and who, when furnishing a chamber-maid with a set of apronstrings, pilfers from her a portion of the tape, exclaims against a vintner for adulterating his liquors, and wittily wonders that he can adopt the christian scheme so far as to baptize even his wine. Messalina, whose chastity is as valiant as a holiday captain, because no enemy is at hand, frowns at the forwardness of young flirts; and a decayed maiden, "far gone in her wane, Sir" who has been but twenty these ten years, and who has more wrinkles on her forehead than dimples on her chin, even she scorns the vestal sisterhood, and turns up her nose at the staleness of antiquated virginity. In literature, as well as in life, we may recognize this propensity. Authors are noted for inconsistency. Instances might be selected from almost every writer in our language. Pope, in conjunction with Arbuthnot and Swift, composed a satirical treatise, the design of which was to lash his poetical brethren for attempting to soar, when their wings only served them to sink. Yet Pope, after some fine panegyrical verses upon Lord Mansfield, fell from a noble height of poetry to the very bottom of the bathos, by concluding his eulogy with the following feeble lines: "Graced as thou art with all the power of words, So known, so honoured in the house of lords." Surely this was as risible a couplet of anticlimax as the distich the bard ridicules by merely quoting it: "Thou Dalhousy, the great god of war, In the works of Swift, who omits no opportu |