sioned charactery for characteristic impulsions for impulses sustention for sustaining-exaustion for exhausted state, &c. &c.

Every lover, indeed, of plainly elegant English, must feel disgusted at the various affectations which pervade the work, and mar some of its best pages; such as, “draped in a light vest" "The extremities of her delicate limbs were rosed with flowing haes," and many more, which our limits preclude our noticing.

"Ida of Athens" is an imitation of Madame de Staël's "Corinna of Italy;" but we cannot compliment the copy→ ist, on having at all equalled the beauties, though she has aptly caught the faults and extravagancies of her original. Still there are parts of this book which we have perused with a pleasure, only lessened by its general improper tendency; and while it is our first and most sacred duty to protest against those cunning mischiefs that war on morality and every purer principle, we are also ever ready, and most willing, to do ample justice to whatever tends to redeem an author, or has an honest claim to approbation. Whether emanating from herself, or gleaned from her miscellaneous reading, we shall not pretend to determine, but we acknowledge her sentiments on some points are as just as they are interesting. From this class we prefer presenting our readers with specimens of the work, convinced that the reprehensible passages to which we have alluded, are unfit for the modest eye of innocence.

"Ida," the heroine, though a high-wrought enthusiast, has many feminine excellencies, and in trying circumstances much praiseworthy exertion and laudable conduct. Her filial affection, attachment to the duties of her situation, and general benevolence of sentiment and action, are all amiable traits of character; while her fortitude in the subjugation of wishes incompatible with prudence and duty, is worthy of imitation. We agree with her, that "The true point of virtue is to immolate the selfish for the social good;" and her reply to the lover, who sought to tempt her from the protection of a parent's arms, has also claims on the attention of our young female readers, for whose advantage we transcribe it.

"To Osmyn.

"Osmyn, I know not who you are, and scarce desire to know. Be your birth what it may, or poor or princely, it cannot make you nobler in my eyes, nor e'er degrade you in my mind's esteem. The sacred love of virtue warns your soul, genius and patriotism

deify your character, and all your feelings adapt your whole exis tence to love and tenderness. These are endowments of Heaven's own gift; and after these, how poor and low the honours man confers! It is also true I love you, most tenderly, most passionately; but if to tell thee so is weakness, it is the sole weakness that love itself shall teach me to commit.

"Oh, Osmyn! why endeavour to conceal from you what perhaps you already suspect, what you must eventually know? If reason, if nature sanction our loves, a duty, now paramount to every other, forbids it. I am not yet a wife; then thy law were mine; but I am still a daughter, and sentiment no less than duty deters me from opposing the wish and will of him, hitherto so dear, so tender, and indulgent. I am indeed a thing inconsequent; yet in the great chain of social compact 1 form a link-the country which respects me the father who depends on me! the brothers who look up to me!-Oh, Osmyn! had your soul been susceptible of no other sentiment than that of love, would you have been preferred to the first and most amiable of the Athenian youth? No: I chose you for yourself alone! I chose you because I believed you capable of a great passion, and of those heroic actions which a great passion alone inspires! It is not for a tame and moderate character to feel that pure, that ardent and sacred sentiment, which in its true and highest nature is connected with all the greater faculties and sublimer emotions of our being, and therefore did my soul elect you as its high and dear associate, as one best capable of loving, and therefore most worthy to be loved. But if you would have me love you fondly, let me esteem you highly. Hitherto I stand acquitted. It was a hero -the champion of Liberty and of Greece, the friend of Athens and of humanity-for whom I exposed myself in the nekkeme of a Turkish tyrant. But it is not for a lover, a frantic lover only, in whom an imprudent passion has subdued every purer, every nobler feeling, that I would violate the delicacy of a national and natural reserve, and steal clandestinely from the dear and safe asylum of a father's 'dwelling. Oh, Osmyn! let me be loved wor◄ thily, or let me be resigned for ever.

IDA."

In the 'character of the "Diako" there is a etrange mixture of the amiable and the impracticable; yet, while the picture is overcharged, it is touching, and has points of high interest.

"The young Smyrnion brought with him to England an imagination deeply impressed with the scenes and imagery of his early life- he brought with him a character already formed upon an eastern model: gentle, ardent, mild, yet energetic; of an exquisite sensibility, and of a passionate yet melancholy temperament. Uuhat he also brought with him an eastern coustitution, on which the sharpness of a chill northern climate began an early ravage,

«An alien in the native land of his parents, committed to the

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care of strangers, unrestrained and unguided, while his memory was stored by the routine of public education, his heart was suffered to cultivate its own feelings, his reason to entertain its own faculties, unclouded by the prejudices of officious and ignorant friends, whose mistaken affection and blind self-love are so careful to propagate the errors, by which they are themselves estranged from reason and from truth; his affections exhausted under the influence of unrestrained feelings, and his mind firm, independent, and inquiring, pursued nature, and found in her the principle of love, of wisdom, and felicity. His early estrangement from his parents left them no claim on his affections. His property rivetted bim to England; and he soon became bound to it by a stronger tie than that of interest. His mind devoted to the philosophy of nature, his heart formed for the generous feelings of friendship, and the whole force and energy of being tending towards the most overwhelming passion of the human heart; estranged from general society, by delicacy of constitution, by habits of study and reflexion, he became the most generous, the most affectionate of friends, to a man of brilliant talents, who had been his preceptor at college; he became the most passionate, the most devoted of lovers, to a woman who found her way to his heart. through the medium of his compassion; it was the power of relieving the difficulties of his tutor, that first made him the friend of the man, whose benefactor he afterwards became. It was in rescuing the parent from impending distress, that he found himself enamoured of a lovely daughter, whom he afterwards made his wife. With the woman he adored, with the friend he loved, in literary pursuit and rural retirement, a few years of more felicity became the purchase of a sad reverse of fate.

"Deceived by her he loved, betrayed by him he trusted, abandoned by both, he found ingratitude and perfidy the reward of love and confidence. He pursued not the fugitives; sensibility of soul-delicacy of constitution were unequal to the shock; he sunk beneath it. Sickness and debility preyed upon the very principles of life; time amended but could not recover his health. His physicians advised a milder climate; and his feelings, rather than his inclination, led him to adopt their counsel; he was prepared to die but to live in England was impossible! and eight years were passed in travelling through the southern countries of Europe! To whatever direction he turned his steps, the misery, and error of man met his eyes-every where he observed the existence of physical evil, produced by the outrages committed on nature; and moral disorder, every where produced by the prejudice and corruption of society. It is,' said he, from the harmonies and conformities of nature, that man should borrow his political and moral adoptions, and learn from the Legislature of the Universe those beneficent laws, which should form the social compact of mankind. Whenever the institutions of govern ment shall tend to excite and develope the natural sensibility of man, the happiness of the state will be affected, for virtue itself is but composed of the affections; and the maxim of wisdom, or No. 130. Vol. 32. April. 1809. 2 B

the exertion of art, proceeds only from that secret impulse, by which nature urges man to enlighten and to cherish his brother man, Nature has only given us desires, whose gratification is enjoyment; but society in its gradual estrangement from her dictates, engenders passions which become the scourge of those who cherish them; man, naturally beneficent, becomes a tyrant; man, naturally free, becomes a slave; and religion, which is of nature, conveyed through the senses to the soul, awakening its gratitude, and commanding its adoration, becomes an incomprehensible dogma, propagated by cruelty and fanaticism, disfigured by human invention on every side, breaking the tie of human sympathy, scattering discord and disorder through nations, founding its merits upon earthly privation, and imposing its belief by eternal terrors. Ia every religion may be traced the arrogant faith of its own infallibility, and in the breast of every fanatic sectarian is established a secret inquisition, by which the opinion of others is tried and condemned. Virtue and felicity are of nature! on every side vice and misery are of man!'

"It was thus he spoke; yet he remembered the wisdom and happiness of ancient Greece, and he looked forward to the enlightened felicity of modern Europe.

"Man,' he said, in his gregarious and social, resembles man in his natural, and solitary, state; and society in its progress is still propelled towards the perfection of that nature which governs its earliest infancy, and which to recover and to imitate, is but a simpler term for the combinations of genius, the inventions of art, the intelligence of wisdom, and the supremacy of virtue.'

With such feelings, with such opinions, the amiable sage bade adieu to Europe, and sought his beautiful and native country. Arrived at his paternal abode, sorrow and disappointment received him at its threshold; his parents were dead; his brother had gone to join a merchant's house in Constantinople; and an only sister had married an Athenian archon, and resided with her husband in his native country. With a thrill of delight he believed himself incapable of feeling, he embarked on the Archipelago for Athens; that region of genius! of heroism and the Graces! whose government had once been the wisest, whose people had once been the happiest, because its laws and its religion tended to confirm the impulses of nature to liberty, to preserve the sacred rights of humanity, to diffuse equally the privileges of denization, and to distinguish the citizen only by the benefits he conferred on the community.

"Amiable and enlightened nation!' he exclaimed, as he caught a glimpse of the splendid ruins of its Acropolis, if from the victor arms of Rome empire extended his sway, and gave bitch to slavery and crime, it was your patriotism and genius that gave birth to freedom, and polished while they enlightened the world!"

"Arrived at the house of his brother-in-law, his welcome was as animated as surprise, and pleasure could make it, and kind as Athenian courtesy could render it; but his sister, was no

more! She had died in giving birth to a daughter who was then in her second year, and whom he found in the arms of a tender and caressing parent."

He adopts the young Ida, and devotes himself to her interests and comforts. His system of female education, if neither quite new, or the theory quite practicable, affords some good ideas on that most important subject.

"All children are. charming their calm and innocent countenances seem stamped with the impress of a celestial origin; they are so fresh from the hands of their Creator, that traits of human defect are not yet visible in their expression. The amiable preceptor of Ida Rosemeli retired from the world with his infant charge; he knew that to teach the young idea how to shoot, was more poetical in sound, than just or practicable in application; and he saw that nature brought with each day her own progressive, perfect plan of education; he watched the senses, gradually correcting by hourly experience the natural errors of a first timid experiment, and communicating to the intellectual power those images from whence ideas spring, which, under the influence of moral sympathy, form their associations, and again expand themselves to new combinations; and he thought with a sigh of the folly of man, that forces on the memory of childhood a premature information which the senses have not yet experienced, and the mind is incapable of comprehending.

"He knew that feeling preceded intelligence; that our wants render us affectionate, before our perceptions make us rational; and that consequently self and social love are the first great springs by which nature actuates and impels mankind. Ida, therefore, impulsively clinging to those whose kindness formed her felicity, had not her warm and tender feelings thrown back upon herself by duties enforced beyond the ability of childish performanceby the severity which awakens terror rather than conviction, and by the privation of the present joy, the threat of a future punishIment, which renders fear the medium of that virtue which should be imbibed from peace, and love, and joy. Considering the imagination as the minor of the senses, which, though frequently transposing, is capable of forming any image abstracted from the sensible impressions it has received, he saw the necessity of estranging from its pure and brilliant surface those equivocal or distorted objects which, untrue to nature, are but the phantoms of error, of ignorance, or superstition. Yet knowing the potent influence of this bright mimie faculty of human intellect, he placed within its sphere such objects as were only incentive to the purest pleasures. Such as awaken enthusiasm for deeds supremely great, or inspire a love for high ideal beauty; still drawing a moral inference from physical taste-still pursuing a sentiment in every object of sense.

While feeling and intelligence thus expanded together, the