supply! To run indignant pens into such heaps of absurdity is surely to prepare for their breaking up.

any

MISS HANNAH MORE, a lady not out of harmony with these discords which mankind have been so long taking for their melancholy music, is the one that comes next. It is the first time we ever read of her verses; and she has fairly surprised us, not only with some capital good sense, but with liberal and feeling sentiments! How could a heart, capable of uttering such things, get encrusted with Calvinism and that, too, not out of fear and bad health, but in full possession, as it should seem, both of cheerfulness and sensibility! Oh, strange effects of example and bringing up! when humanity itself can be made to believe in the divineness of what is inhuman! "Sweet Sensibility!" cries our fair advocate of eternal punishment

"Sweet Sensibility! thou keen delight!
Unprompted moral! sudden sense of right!
Perception exquisite! fair virtue's seed!
Thou quick precursor of the liberal deed!
Thou hasty conscience! reason's blushing morn!
Instinctive kindness ere reflection 's born!

Prompt sense of equity! to thee belongs
The swift redress of unexamin'd wrongs!

Eager to serve, the cause perhaps untried,'
But always apt to choose the suffering side!
To those who know thee not, no words can paint,

And those who know thee, know all words are faint.”

And again :

"Since life's best joys consist in peace and ease,
And tho' but few can serve, yet all may please,
O let th' ungentle spirit learn from hence,
A small unkindness is a great offence."

The whole poem, with the exception of some objections to preachers of benevolence like Sterne (who must be taken, like the fall of the dew, in their general effect upon the mass of the world) is full of good sense and feeling; though what the fair theologian guards us against in our estimation of complexional good nature, is to be carried a good deal farther than she supposes. "As Feeling," she

says,

66

tends to good, or leans to ill,
It gives fresh force to vice or principle;
'Tis not a gift peculiar to the good,
'Tis often but a virtue of the blood;

And what would seem Compassion's moral flow,
Is but a circulation swift or slow."

True; and what would seem religion's happy flow is often nothing better. But this argues nothing against religion or compassion. Whatever tends to secure the happiest flow of the blood provides best for the ends of virtue, if happiness be virtue's object. A man, it is true, may begin with being happy, on the mere strength of the purity and vivacity of his pulse: children do so; but he must have derived his constitution from very virtuous, temperate, and

happy parents indeed, and be a great fool to boot, and wanting in the commonest sympathies of his nature, if he can continue happy, and yet be a bad man: and then he could not be bad, in the worst sense of the word, for his defects would excuse him. It is time for philosophy and true religion to know one another, and not hesitate to follow the most impartial truths into their consequences. If" a small unkindness is a great offence," what could Miss Hannah More have said to the infliction of eternal punishment? Or are God and his ways eternally to be represented as something so different from the best attributes of humanity, that the wonder must be, how humanity can survive in spite of the mistake? The truth is, that the circulation of Miss More's own blood was a better thing than all her doctrines put together; and luckily it is a much more universal inheritance. The heart of man is constantly sweeping away the errors he gets into his brain.

There is a good deal of sense and wit in the extract from Florio, a Tale for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladies; but Miss More is for attributing the vices of disingenuousness, sneering, and sensuality, to freethinkers exclusively; which is disingenuous on her own part; as if these vices were not shared by the inconsistent of all classes. She herself sneers in the very act of denouncing sneerers; nor did we ever know that a joke was spared by the orthodox when they could get one.

We must now bring our extracts to a conclusion. There are some agreeable specimens of Miss Baillie; an admirable ballad on the Wind, attributed to Mr. Wordsworth's sister; and some pieces by Miss Landon and Mrs. Hemans, two popular writers, who would have brought their pearls to greater perfection if they had concentrated their faculties a little, and been content not to manufacture so many. But as these ladies bring us among their living contemporaries, and criticism becomes a matter of great delicacy, we must resist the temptation of being carried further.

DUCHESS OF ST. ALBANS, AND MARRIAGES FROM THE STAGE.

Comic actors and actresses more engaging to the recollection than tragic.-Charles the Second and Nell Gwynn.-Marriage of Harriett Mellon with the Duke of St. Albans and Mr. Coutts.-Marriages of Lucretia Bradshaw with Mr. Folkes, of Anastasia Robinson with Lord Peterborough, Beard the singer with Lady Henrietta Herbert, Lavinia Fenton with the Duke of Bolton, Mary Woffington with Captain Cholmondeley, Signor Gallini the dancer with Lady Elizabeth Bertie, O'Brien the comedian with Lady Susan Fox, Elizabeth Linley with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Elizabeth Farren with the Earl of Derby, Louisa Brunton with Earl Craven, Mary Catherine Bolton with Lord Thurlow. Remarks on Marriages from the Stage.

BESIDES the interest in such subjects, which lies below the surface, most people are willing to hear of actors and actresses. They are a link between the domesticities which they represent, and the public life to which they become allied by the representation. Their talent (generally speaking) is not felt to be of a rarity or happiness calculated to excite envy; their animal spirits are welcomed the more