ANECDOTES OF DR. YOUNG.

studying the Hebrew text, and more versed in the Jewish Chroni

Montagu.

I

HAVE great joy in Dr. Young, whom I disturbed in a reverie; at first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprize, then began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times, forgot what he had been saying, began a new subject, and so went on. I told him your Grace desired he would write longer letters; to which he cried Ha! most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom, I believe, you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom friend. You would, perhaps suppose it was a bishop, a dean, a prebend, a pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life; or if a layman, of most virtuous conversation, one that had paraphrased St. Matthew, or wrote comments on Saint Paul; one blind with

Certainly in their religious, moral, and civil character, there is no relation, but in their dramatic capacity there is some. But why the reverend divine, and serious author of the melancholy Night Thoughts, should desire to appear as a persona dramatis here I cannot imagine. The waters have raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as your Grace will imagine when I tell you how sublime an answer he made to a very vulgar question: I asked him how long he staid at the Wells? he said, as long as my rival staid. I was astonished how one who made no pretensions to any thing could have a rival, so I asked him for an explanation; he said he would stay as long as the sun did. He did an admirable thing to Lady Sunderland; on her mentioning Sir Robert Sutton, he asked her where Sir Robert's Lady was? on which we all laughed very heartily,

and

but in shape much resembling Sancho's ass; then followed your humble servanton a milk-white palfrey, whose reverence for the human kind induced him to be governed by a creature not half as strong, and, I fear, scarce twice as wise as himself. By this enthusiasm of his, rather than my own skill, I rode on in safety, and at leisure, to observe the company; especially the two figures that brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly armed with two uncharged pistols; whose holsters were covered with two civil harmless monsters that signified the valour and courtesey of our ancestors. The last was the Doctor's man, whose uncombed hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, one could not help imagining they were of kin, and wishing that for the honour of the family they had had one comb betwixt them; on his head was a velvet cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his side hung a little basket. Thus did we ride, or rather jog on, to Tunbridge town, which is five miles from the wells. To tell you how the dogs barked at us, the children squalled, and the men and women stared, would take up too much time; let it suffice, that not even a tame magpie, or caged starling, let us pass unnoted. At last we arrived at the King's-head, where the loyalty of the Doctor induced him to alight, and then knight errant like, he took his damsels from off their palfreys, and courteously handed us into the inn. We took this progress to see the ruins of an old castle; but first our divine would visit the churchyard, where we read that folks were born and died, the natural,

moral, and physical history of mankind. In the church-yard grazed the parson's steed, whose back was worn bare with carrying a pillionseat for the comely, fat personage, this ecclesiastic's wife; and though the creature eat part of the parish, he was most miserably lean.....

When we had seen the church, the parson invited us to take some refreshment at his house, but Dr. Young thought we had before enough trespassed on the good man's time, so desired to be excused, eise we should, no doubt, have been welcomed to the house by Madam, in her muslin pinners, and sarsenet hood; who would have given us some mead, and a piece of a cake, that she had made in the Whitsun holidays, to treat her cousins. However, Dr. Young, who would not be outdone in good offices, invited the divine to our inn, where we went to dinner; but he excused himself, and came after the meal was over, in hopes of smoking a pipe; but our Doctor hinted to him that it would not be proper to offer any incense, but sweet praise, to such goddesses as Mrs. Rolt and your humble servant. To say the truth, I saw a large horn tobacco box, with Queen Ann's head upon it, peeping out of his pocket, but I did not care to take the hint, and desire him to put in use that magnificent piece of furniture. After dinner we walked to the old castle, which was built by Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, in William Rufus's days.

It has been a most magnificent building; the situation is extremely beautiful; the castle made a kind of a half moon down to the river; and where the river does not defend it, it has been guarded

guarded by a large moat. It is now in the hands of a country squire, who is no common sort of man; but having said so much of the parson, I will let the rest of the parish depart in peace, though I cannot help feeling the utmost resentment at him for cutting down some fine trees almost cotemporary with the castle, which he did to make room for a plantation of sour grapes. The towers at the great gate are covered with fine venerable ivy.

It was late in the evening before we got home, but the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens, and cast such a light on the earth as shewed its beauties in a soft and gentle light. The night silenced all but our divine Doctor, who sometimes uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and harkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, till I found by my horse's stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind was leading the blind; so I placed my servant between the Doctor and myself, which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical strain to the great amazement of my poor clown of a servant, who not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any answer to all the fine things he heard, the Doctor wondering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, look ed round, declared his surprize, and desired the man to trot on before; and thus did we return to Tunbridge-Wells. I can give your Grace great comfort in telling you Dr. Young will be with you in a week's time.

PISAN POETS.

(From Forsyth's Remarks on Italy, &c.)

In reviewing some of these bards, I shall begin with Pignotti, as be still belongs to Pisa. So little does this elegant fabulist owe to genius, that his very ease, I understand, is the result of severe study; and conscious of this he seems to describe his own faculty in these lines:

-La natura

Parrà che versati habbia da vena
Facil versi che costan tanta pena.

Pignotti admires Pope and resembles him. The powers of bath seem confined to embellish the thoughts of others; and both have depraved with embellishment the simplicity of the early Greeks.— Pope's Homer is much too fine for the original; and Pignotti, for want of Esop's naïveté, has turned his fables into tales. Some of his best novelle are reserved for private circles. I heard him read one on "the art of robbing," which could not be safely published by a Tuscan placeman. In the man him. self you see little of the poet, little of that refined satire which runs through his fables and has raised those light-winged, loose, little things to the rank of Italian classics.

Bertola is perhaps a more genuine fabulist than Pignotti. He does not labour to be easy; for he has naturally the negligence and sometimes the vacuity of a rhyming gentleman. His fugitive pieces are as light as the poetical cobwebs of his friend Borgognini. His sonnets ran upon love or religion, and some inspire that mystic, unmean

ing tenderness which Petrarch infuses into such subjects. Bertola is too fond of universality and change. He has been a traveller, a monk, a secular priest, a professor in different universities and in different sciences, an historian, a poet, a biographer, a journalist, an -improvisatore

Bondi has also been bitten by the "estro" of sonnet; but he is more conspicuous as a painter of manners. His "conversazioni" and alla moda" expose some genteel follies with great truth of ridicule. His " His "giornata villareccia," is diversified, not by the common expedient of episodes, but by a skilful interchange of rural description, good-natured satire, and easy philosophy. The same subject has been sung by Melli in Sicilian, which is the doric of Italian poetry and full of the ancient Theocritan dialect.

Cesarotti is the only Italian now alive (I hope Caiafa will pardon the exclusion) that has shown pow. ers equal to an original epic; but those noble powers he has wasted in stooping to paraphrase the savage nonsense of Ossian, and in working on Homer's unimprovable rhapsodies. The Iliad he pulls down and rebuilds on a plan of his own. He brings Hector into the very front, and re-moulds the morals and decoration of the poem.He retains most of the sublime that flashes through the original; but he has modernized some of its manners, given a certain relief to its simplicity, and suppressed those repetitions peculiar to Homer, and to the literature of the early ages.

Parini has amused, and I hope, corrected his countrymen by the VOL. LVI.

Mattina and Mezzogiorno, for the other two parts of the day he left imperfect. An original vein of irony runs through all his pictures, and brings into view most of the affections accredited in high life or in fine conversation. He lays on colour enough, yet he seldom ca-' ricatures follies beyond their natural distortion. His style is highly poetical, and, being wrought into trivial subjects, it acquires a curious charm from the contrast. He is thought inferior to Bettinelli in the structure of blank verse; but the seasoning and pungency of his themes are more relished here than the milder instruction of that venerable bard.

Fantoni, better known by his Arcadian name Labindo, is in high favour as a lyric poet. This true man of fashion never tires his fancy by any work of length; he flies from subject to subject, delighted and delighting. You see Horace in every ode, Horace's modes of thinking, his variety of measures, his imagery, his transitions. Yet Labindo wants the Horatian ease; he is too studious of diction, and hazards " some taffeta phrases, silken terms precise," which remind us of our late Della Crusca jargon.

Pindemonte was connected with some of our English Cruscans, but he cannot be charged with their flimsy, gauzy, glittering nonsense. He thinks, and he makes his readers think. Happy in description, sedate even in his light themes, generally melancholy and sometimes sublime, he bears a fine resemblance to our Gray, and like Gray, has written but little in a country where most poets are voluminous.