A few months before the composition of

which I have exhibited only a part, is drawn with so just so discriminating and so vivid a pencil as to be unequalled, unless it be by the celebrated delineation of the same great dra. matist by the hand of Dryden.

With the name of Maurice Morgann, who has fondled my infancy in his arms, who was the friend of my youth, who expanded the liberality of my opening heart, and first taught me to think and to judge,-with this interesting name so many sadly-pleasing recollections are associated that I cannot dismiss it without reluctance. He was my friend: but he was the friend also of his species. The embrace of his mind was ample; that of his benevolence was unbounded. With great rectitude of understanding, he possessed a fancy that was always creative and playful. On every subject, for on every subject he thought acutely and deeply, his ideas were original and striking. Even when he was in error he continued to be specious and to please and he never failed of your applause, though he might sometimes of your assent. When your judgment coyly held back, your imagination yielded to his seductive addresses; and you wished him to be right when you were forced to pronounce that he was wrong. This is spoken only of those webs which his fancy perpetually spun and dipped in the rain-bow: his heart was always in the right. With a mind of too fine a texture for business, too theoretical and abstract to be executive, he discharged with honour the office of under secretary of state when the late marquis of Lansdown was for the first time in power; and he was subsequently sent by that nobleman across the Atlantic as the intended legislator of Canada. His public and his private life were impelled by the same principles to the same object;-by the love of liberty and virtue to the

* This able and, to decide from the consistency of his public conduct, this upright statesman died on the 7th of May 1805, and bequeathed his whig principles and virtues to his second son, Lord Henry Petty, who lately filled the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer.

his Lycidas, our author's domestic happiness

happiness of man. If his solicitous and enlightened representations had experienced attention, the temporary and the abiding evils of the American contest would not have existed; and the mother and her offspring would still have been supported and supporting with their mutual embrace. From a long intercourse with the world he acquired no suspicion, no narrowness, no hardness, no moroseness. With the simplicity and candour, he retained to the last the cheerfulness and the sensibility of childhood. The tale of distress, which he never staid to investigate, passed immediately through his open ear into his responsive heart; and his fortune, small as his disinterestedness had suffered it to remain, was instantly communicated to relieve. His humanity comprehended the whole animated creation; and nothing could break the tenor of his temper but the spectacle of oppression or of cruelty. His failings (and the most favoured of our poor species are not without failings) were few, and untinctured with malignity. High as he was placed by nature, he was not above the littleness of vanity; and kindlily as were the elements blended in him, his manner would sometimes betray that contempt of others, which the wisest are perhaps the least prone to entertain, and which the best are the most studious to conceal. Though he courted praise, and was not nice respecting the hand which tendered it or the form in which it came, yet has he refused it in the most honourable shape, and when offered to him by the public. He has been importuned in vain to give a second edition of his Essay on Falstaff; and his repeated injunctions have impelled his execu trix to an indiscriminate destruction of his papers, some of which, in the walks of politics metaphysics and criticism, would have planted a permanent laurel on his grave.

Such were his frailties and inconsistencies, the objects only of a doubtful smile:-but his virtues and his talents made him the delight of the social, the instruction or the comfort of the solitary hour.

Though he had been accustomed to contemplate the awful crisis of death with more terror than belonged to his innocent

had received a shock by the death" of his mother; and, with the concurrence of his father, he resolved at this time on an excursion to the continent, with a view more particularly to the classic region of Italy. He was now in his thirtieth year: his large mind was amply stored with the spoils of universal knowledge; and, from a wider conversation with the living world, his character now demanded its last accomplishment and polishthat fine softening, as it were, into life which makes the sculpture breathe, and places it among the wonders of the world. On the intimation of his design, he received a letter from the celebrated Sir Henry Wotton, who

life or to his generally intrepid breast, he met the consummation without alarm, and expired with as much serenity as he had lived. This event happened at his house in Knightsbridge, in the seventy-seventh year of his age, on the 28th of March,

1802.

Xaipe! Vale!

I shall never cease to think with a sigh of the grave in which I saw your body composed, till my own shall require the same pious covering of dust, and shall solicit, with far inferior claims. yet haply not altogether in vain, for the same fond charity of a tear. C. S.

"On the 3d of April, 1637, as is recorded on her monument in Horton church.

• Abeuntem vir clarissimus, Henricus Woottonus, qui ad Venetos orator Jacobi regis diu fuerat, et votis et præceptis, eunti peregrè sanè utilissimis eleganti epistolâ præscriptis, me amicissimè prosequutus est. Def. Sec. P. W. v. 231.-Wotton was a scholar and a poet, as well as a friend of poets. He wrote

had resided at Venice as ambassador from James the first and was now provost of Eton. This letter shall be inserted as evincing the reputation and consequence of Milton, while it impresses us with a favourable idea of the taste and the friendliness of its writer.

66 SIR,

The College, April 18th, 1638.

"It was a special favour, when you lately bestowed upon me here the first taste of your acquaintance, though no longer than to make me know, that I wanted more time to value it, and to enjoy it rightly. And in truth, if I could then have imagined your farther stay in these parts, which I understood afterward by Mr. H. I would have been bold, in our vulgar phrase, to mend my draught, for you left me with an extreme thirst; and to have begged your conversation again, jointly with your said learned friend, at a poor meal or two, that we might have bandied together some good authors of

a tragedy called Tancredo, of which I know nothing but the name; and a few odes, which, as Mr. Warton informs me, have the merit of some elegance. He was the friend of Donne and of Cowley.-" Our common friend, Mr. R." in this letter, is probably Rouse the Bod. Librarian, to whom Milton has addressed a Latin ode: and "the late Mr. R's poems," Mr. Warton determines to be the poems of Thomas Randolph, M. A. Fellow of Trin. Coll. Cambridge, who died March 17, 1634.

the ancient time, among which I observed you to have been familiar.

"Since your going, you have charged me with new obligations, both for a very kind. letter from you, dated the sixth of this month, and for a dainty piece of entertainment that came therewith; wherein I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish with a certain Doric delicacy in your songs and odes, wherein I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language, ipsa mollities. But I must not omit to tell you, that I now only owe you thanks for intimating unto me, how modestly soever, the true artificer. For the work itself I had viewed some good while before with singular delight, having received it from our common friend Mr. R. in the very close of the late R.'s poems printed at Oxford; whereunto it is added, as I now suppose, that the accessory might help out the principal, according to the art of stationers, and leave the reader con la bocca dolce.

Now, sir, concerning your travels, wherein I may challenge a little more privilege of discourse with you, I suppose you will not blanch Paris in your way. Therefore I have been bold to trouble you with a few lines to