fully, that this epistle, together with Lord BACON's thirty-third Essay, contains almost all that can be said on the use and abuse of riches, and the absurd extremes of avarice and profusion. But our poet has enlivened his precepts with so many various characters, pictures, and images, as may entitle him to claim the preference over all that have treated on this tempting subject, down from the time of the Plutus of Aristophanes. That very lively and amiable old nobleman, the late Lord BATHURST, told me, "that he was much surprised to see what he had with repeated pleasure so often read as an epistle addressed to himself, in this edition converted into a dialogue; in which," said he, "I perceive I really make but a shabby and indifferent figure, and contribute very little to the spirit of the dialogue, if it must be a dialogue; and I hope I had generally more to say for myself in the many charming conversations I used to hold with POPE and Swift, and my old poetical friends."

18. A Statesman's slumbers how this speech would spoil! "Sir, Spain has sent a thousand jars of oil;

Huge bales of British cloth blockade the door;
A hundred oxen at your levee roar."*

* Ver, 55.

Nothing

Nothing can exceed this ridicule of the many inconveniencies that would have encumbered vil→ lainy, by bribing and by paying in kind. The following examples carry the satire still higher, and can hardly be thought to be excelled by any strokes of irony and humour in the best parts of Horace, Juvenal, or Boileau.

His Grace will game; to White's a bull be led,
With spurning heels, and with a butting head.
To White's be carry'd, as to ancient † games,
Fair coursers, vases, and alluring dames.
Shall then Uxorio, if the stakes he sweep,
Bear home six whores, and make his lady weep?
Or soft Adonis, so perfum'd and fine,

Drive to St. James's a whole herd of swine?

We can only lament that our author did not live long enough to be a witness of the midnight

(or

* As a consecrated beast to a sacrifice; and alluding to Virgil, with much pleasantry:

Jam cornu petat, & pedibus qui spargat arenam.

Alluding to the prizes that Achilles bestows in the games of Homer. Iliad. 23. b.

Ver. 67.

(or morning) orgies of the gamesters at BROOKS's. What a subject for the severity of his satire! Perhaps we might have seen men

Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
Yet touch'd and sham'd by ridicule alone!

For surely that vice deserves the keenest invective, which, more than any other, has a natural and invincible tendency to narrow and to harden the heart, by impressing and keeping up habits of selfishness. "I foresee (said MONTESQUIEU to a friend visiting him at La Brede) that gaming will, one day, be the ruin of Europe. During play, the body is in a state of indolence, and the mind in a state of vicious activity."

19. Damn'd to the mines, an equal fate betides
The slave that digs it, and the slave that hides.*

This is plainly taken from the causes of the decay of Christian Piety. "It has always been

held

* Ver. 109.

See the Adventurer, No. 63, published 1753. The reflection with which CHARTRES's epitaph, in this epistle, concludes, is from LA BRUYERE.

held (says this excellent writer) the severest treatment of slaves and malefactors, damnare ad metalla, to force them to dig in the mines: now this is the covetous man's lot, from which he is never to expect a release." And the character of Helluo, the glutton, who exclaimed, even in his last agonies, (at the end of the first of these epistles,)

then bring the jowl!

is clearly borrowed from the conclusion of one of the tales of LA FONTAINE :

Puis qu'il faut que je meure

Sans faire tant de façon,

Qu'on m' apporte tout à l'heure
Le reste de mon poisson.

So true is that candid acknowledgment which our author makes in his sensible preface, "I fairly confess that I have served myself all I could by reading." But the noble passage I shall next quote, he has not borrowed from any writer. It is intended to illustrate the usefulness, in the hands of a gracious Providence, that results from

the

the extremes of avarice and profusion; and it recurs to the leading principle of our author's philosophy, namely, that contrarieties, and varieties, and excesses, in the moral as well as the natural world, by counter-poising and counterworking each other, contribute ultimately to the benefit and beauty of the whole.

Hear then the truth: " 'tis Heav'n each passion sends,
And different men directs to different ends;
Extremes in nature equal good produce,
Extremes in man concur to gen❜ral use.

Ask we what makes one keep, and one bestow?
That Pow'r who bids the ocean ebb and flow;
Bids seed-time, harvest, equal course maintain,
Thro' reconcil'd extremes of drought and rain;
Builds life on death, on change duration founds,
And gives th' eternal wheels to know their rounds."*

VOLTAIRE has, in many parts of his works, besides his Candide, and his Philosophical Dictionary, exerted the utmost efforts of his wit and argument, to depreciate and destroy the doctrine of Optimism, and the idea that

Th' eternal art educes good from ill.

He

* Ver. 159.