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signate them all is impossible. Nevertheless let not your national vanity take the alarm, if I tell you that I could point out a constellation of modern British writers, whose splendor would dazzle, you, and in the brilliancy of whose radiance, the combined light of Irish wit for a century past, would look faint and dim, as, the stars in the presence of the rising Sun, Ireland boasts fand boasts sufficiently) of Swift, and Steele, and Farquhar; of Goldsmith the Poet, and Barry the Tragedian, and Barry the Historical Painter; of Edmund Burke, and Richard Sheridan; of Grattan, and Curran, and Thomas Moore: but, mark the liberality of this country; England makes these very men (aliens as they are) the subjects of her pride and exultation likewise, and on all occasions, kindly allows them to pass for her own, and to rank as English

classics! Yet what are these when put in comparison with the authors of Essays on Bullion, and on paper currency; of the art of Cookery, (a work which in this temperate or rather ab stemious nation has run through two hundred and forty Editions,) of the Life of Lord Nelson, on Elephant paper; of the travels of Knights, Baronets, and Peers; of the Poems of Honourables and Right-Honourables; of all the Triumphs, and Curses, and Sorrows, and Pains, and Tears, and Pleasures; of Madoc, and the Butterfly's Ball, and the Lady of the Lake, &c. &c. &c.

qube ttol And this brings me to consider another feature of English superiority; namely, the encouragement afforded here to literary genius by the prevailing modes of Education; and the attention paid by the legislature to

the quality of such publications as are vended by the booksellers in Leadenhall-street, Paternoster-row, Pall-Mall, and elsewhere, or hired by the keepers of Circulating libraries. With respect to the first mentioned cause of the propensity of this people to literature, and their pre-eminence therein over all the world, the system ofeducation pursued, it is indisputably the best ever framed or acted upon both for the purpose of Instruction, and the preservation of Morals. No such establishments here exist as Public boarding schools, each containing two or three hundred boys, who at the expense of an enormous sum of money, in five years, acquire nothing but the arts of boxing, cricket-playing, and writing, nonsense in latin hexameters; and becoming mature in debauchery before their growth is halffinished, proceed to a school of a larger

description, called elsewhere an University, and there waste four additional years of life, in riding hacks and driving Tandems; doing juraments and Generals; reading Wall-lectures; drinking sloe. juice, walking the streets, cheating their tailors, ridiculing their tutors, and finally entering the world, in the characters of Members of the Senate, Militia Captains, drunken Squires, or sporting Rectors.

Neither in England are there

any Seminaries for female youth, to which girls are despatched at nine or ten years of age, and where they are detained until seventeen or eighteen, that their indolent and voluptuous mothers may have more leisure for their own licentious pursuits, while their daughters learn to dance badly, to understand Botany, to dawb vellum and velvet with black-beetles, wreathed

shells, and cabbage roses; to talk, filthily, in corrupt French, and mewl Italian nonsense over a Piano! I here cannot resist the opportunity of presenting you with a copy of part of a letter from one of these thorough bred female botanists to another of her own class: it got abroad, I know not how, and excited much laughter amongst these high minded and rational English. The accomplished writer is (I believe) describing to her Correspondent, the Magnolia, and, (as she herself expresses it) in the plainest terms she could find.

You must understand,

10

my

sweet

Prissy, that these are all Polyandria

Pubygnia, and are placed in the