You who have often rallied me upon what you was pleased to call the sickly delicacy of my taste in belles-lettres, will readily conceive the disgust I am exposed to by perusing several recent biographical works which you will receive by Captain The truth is, when I inquire after some great man whose fame has crossed the Atlantic, I am immediately referred to an elegant edition of his life-and, in reading it, feel the same disappointment as if I should employ Mr. West to paint a full-length portrait of William the third, expecting he would represent that hero mounted on his proud charger, contending for kingdoms at the battle of Boyne, and he should (in the spirit of an English biographer) represent the glorious protestant deliverer perched in his water-closet, writhing in all the contortions of a dry belly-ache! Oh, it is vile! it is descending from the dignity of the biographer, to expose the infirmities of the wise for the gratification of the idle; to patch the

venerable garb of wisdom with the motley of Harlequin, and hold it forth as a laughing-stock for folly. When the public taste can relish such biography it presents a sure but melancholy proof of the decadence of learning in any country.—Although he cannot boast of originality, Dr. Johnson set the fashion of this gossiping biography. In his lives of the British poets, he was sedulous to collect those little ana which make weak readers laugh and wise men grieve. From him we learn that Addison tippled, and his wife was a termagant; that Prior affected sordid converse in base company, and that his Chloe was a despicable drab; that Pope was a glutton, and fell a sacrifice to a silver sauce-pan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampries; and that Rag Smith was a sloven. When I first read Johnson's Lives of the British Poets I regretted those littlenesses, but when I read his life of the immortal Milton, the latchet of whose shoes (with reverence be it spoken)

he was not worthy to unloose, I then hoped I should live to see the day when some biographer of his own school might write this author's life, and mete out to him the measure he meted unto others. I have lived to be fully gratified-I have read the life of Samuel Johnson, L. L. D. by Mrs. Hester Thrale, Sir John Hawkins, and James Boswell, Esq. and, to my infinite satisfaction, these three have raised a tripod of incense to his fame, from which any man of decent regard to his reputation would be happy to fly for sanctuary to the pillory.

Such an abhorrence of these, and similar biographers, has been excited in those who apprehended they might be damned by them to everlasting fame, that, to rescue their memories from obloquy, and their friends and relations from shame and sorrow, several eminent literary men have been compelled to publish their own memoirs. Among these, Richard Cumberland, grandson of the great Bentley, and

the first dramatist in England, has lately published an account of his own life and writings, and I am told, by one of his friends, he means, by adding supplement to supplement, to preclude the possibility of his memory's being lacerated by these biographical hyænas. That he published his own memoirs from such motives is apparent from one of his concluding sentences:"Man has no need, no right, no "interest, to know of man more than I "have enabled every one to know of me." David Hume, near thirty years before, wrote his own life; which should be esteemed, by the English, in mode, a model for biographers; for he has disclosed all those incidents which the world has any need, right, or interest to know.

Besides those memoirs which issue proudly from the press, in appropriate volumes, there are a variety of voluminous biographical collections, alphabetically arranged, which are filled with celebrated names, known only to the collectors: and,

in addition to this, the magazines lend their aid to perpetuate memory; and here, with wonderful industry, the darkest recesses of obscurity are ransacked to find names and anecdotes to fill their columns. It is curious to observe what ingenuity is displayed to eke out the memoirs, and give celebrity to a man whose life might be abundantly comprised in the biography of a village tombstone. One of these Lilliputian biographies I will extract, for your amusement, from the Gentleman's Magazine-it will serve as a specimen.

"August.-Died, at Wragby, on the "23d ult. Mr. Jacob Bonnycastle, aged “64.-N. B. Some notice of this eminent person in our next."

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September.-Mr. Jacob Bonnycastle, "whose death we announced in our last, "was the son of Mr. Isaac Bonnycastle, "and grandson to the justly celebrated "Mr. Abraham Bonnycastle, who, in "1742, was the first person who disco"vered the approach of Lord Anson's

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