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the whole set gilt and lettered, I thank him). Why, the two last volumes are worse than the four first; particularly Dr. Akenside is in a deplorable way.* What signifies learning and the ancients, (Mason will say triumphantly) why should people read Greek to lose their imagination, their ear, and their mother tongue ? But then there is Mr. Shenstone, who trusts to nature and simple sentiment, why does he do no better? he goes hopping along his own gravel-walks, and never deviates from the beaten paths for fear of being lost.

I have read Dr. Swift, and am disappointed. There is nothing of the negociations that I have not seen better in M. de Torcy

* I have been told that this writer, unquestionably a man of great learning and genius, entertained, some years before his death, a notion that Poetry was only true eloquence in metre; and, according to this idea, wrote his ode to the country gentlemen of England, and afterwards made considerable alterations in that collection of odes which he had published in the earlier part of his life. We have seen in the letter LX., that Mr. Gray thought highly of his descriptive talents at that time. We are not therefore to impute what he here says to any prejudice in the critic, but to that change of taste in the poet, which (if the above anecdote be true) would unavoidably flatten his descriptions, and divest them of all picturesque imagery; nay, would sometimes convert his verse into mere prose; or, what is still worse, hard inflated prose.

His bistory of the four last years of queen Annę.

before. The manner is careless, and has little to distinguish it from common writers. I meet with nothing to please me but the spiteful characters of the opposite party and its leaders. I expected much more secret history.

CII.

TO MR. STONHEWER.

Cambridge, August 18, 1758.

I AM as sorry as you seem to be, that our ac quaintance harped so much on the subject of materialism, when I saw him with you in town, because it was plain to which side of the long-debated question he inclined. That we are indeed mechanical and dependent beings, I need no other proof than my own feelings; and from the same feelings I learn, with equal conviction, that we are not merely such: that there is a power within that struggles against the force and bias of that mechanism, commands its motion, and, by frequent practice, reduces it to that ready obedience, which we call habit; and all this in conformity to a preconceived opinion (no matter whether right or wrong) to that least

material of all agents, a thought. 'I have known many in his case who, while they thought they were conquering an old prejudice, did not perceive they were under the influence of one far more dangerous; one that furnishes us with a ready apology for all our worst actions, and opens to us a full licence for doing whatever we please; and yet these very people were not at all the more indulgent to other men (as they naturally should have been); their indignation to such as offended them, their desire of revenge on any body that hurt them was nothing mitigated: in short, the truth is, they wished to be persuaded of that opinion for the sake of its convenience, but were not so in their heart; and they would have been glad (as they ought in common prudence) that nobody else should think the same, for fear of the mischief that might ensue to themselves. His French author I never saw, but have read fifty in the same strain, and shall read no more. I can be wretched enough without them. They put me in mind of the Greek sophist that got immortal honour by discoursing so feelingly on the miseries of our condition, that fifty of his audience went home and hanged themselves; yet he lived himself (I suppose) many years after in very good plight.

You say you cannot conceive how lord Shaftesbury came to be a philosopher in vogue; I will tell you: first, he was a lord; 2dly, he was as vain as any of his readers; 3dly, men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; 4thly, they will believe any thing at all, provided they are under no obligation to believe it; 5thly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads no where; 6thly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm. A dead lord ranks but with commoners: vanity is no longer interested in the matter, for the new road is become an old one. The mode of free-thinking is like that of ruffs and farthingales, and has given place to the mode of not thinking at all; once it was reckoned graceful, half to discover and half conceal the mind, but now we have been long accustomed to see it quite naked: primness and affectation of style, like the good breeding of queen Anne's court, has turned to hoydening and rude familiarity.

STRICTURES ON THE WRITINGS OF
LORD BOLINGBROKE.

"I will allow lord Bolingbroke, that the moral, as well as physical, attributes of God must be known to us only à posteriori, and that this is the only real knowledge we can have either of the one or the other; I will allow too, that perhaps it may be an idle distinction which we make between them: his moral attributes being as much in his nature and essence as those we call his physical; but the occasion of our making some distinction is plainly this: his eternity, infinity, omniscience, and almighty power, are not what connect him, if I may so speak, with us his creatures. We adore him, not because he always did, in every place, and always will, exist; but because he gave and still preserves to us our own existence by an exertion of his goodness. We adore him, not because he knows and can do all things, but because he made us capable of knowing and of doing what may conduct us to happi ness: it is therefore his benevolence which we adore, not his greatness or power; and if we are made only to bear our part in a system, without any regard to our own par

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