the philosopher and the philosophist; to honour the one, and to chastise the other. In the following extract from one of his letters to Sir William Forbes, in the autumn of 1766, the correctness of his sentiments on the fashionable scepticism of the times, will appear manifest.

"Your neglect of the modern philosophical sceptics, who have too much engaged the attention of these times, does equal honour to your understanding and to your heart. To suppose that every thing may be made matter of dispute, is an exceeding false principle, subversive of all true science, and prejudicial to the happiness of mankind. To confute without convincing is a common case, and indeed a very easy matter: in all conviction (at least in all moral and religious conviction), the heart is engaged, as well as the understanding; and the understanding may be satisfied, or at least confounded, with the doctrine, from which the heart recoils with the strongest aversion. This is not the language of a logician; but this, I hope, is the language of an honest man, who considers all science as frivolous, which does not make men wiser and better; and to puzzle with words, without producing conviction (which is all that our metaphysical sceptics have been able to do), can never promote either the wisdom or the virtue of mankind. It is strange that men should so often forget, that happiness is our being's end and aim.' Happiness is desirabie for its own sake: truth is desirable only as a mean of producing happiness for who would not prefer an agreeable delusion to a melancholy truth? What then is the use of that philosophy, which aims to inculcate truth at the expence of happiness, by introducing doubt and disbelief in the place of confidence and hope? Surely the promoters of all such philosophy are either the enemies of mankind, or the dupes of their own most egregious folly. I mean not to make any concessions in favour of metaphysical truth: genuine truth and genuine happiness were never inconsistent: but metaphysical truth (such as we find in our sceptical systems) is not genuine, for it is perpetually changing; and no wonder, since it depends not on the common sense of mankind (which is always the same), but varies, according as the talents and inclinations of different authors are different. The doctrines of metaphysical scepticism are either true or false if false, we have little to do with them; if true, they prove the fallacy of the human faculties, and therefore prove too much; for it follows, as an undeniable consequence, that all human doctrines whatsoever (themselves not excepted) are fallacious, and consequently, pernicious, insignificant and vain."

:

A letter from Dr. John Gregory to Dr. Beattie, written in the . month of June in the following year, on the same topic, cannot appear misplaced here.

"I have been in daily expectation of seeing your papers, which you said some time ago you would send me. Pray what is become of them? By the accounts Mr. Williamson gave me of them, I am sure they will be much to my taste. I am well convinced that the great deference paid to our modern heathens has been productive of the worst effects. Young people are impressed with an idea of their being men of superior abilities,

A a 3

whose

whose genius has raised them above vulgar prejudices, and who have spirit enough to avow openly their contempt of them. Atheism and materialism are the present fashion. If one speak with warmth of an infinitely wise and good Being, who sustains and directs the frame of nature, or expresses. his steady belief of a future state of existence, he gets hints of his having either a very weak understanding, or of being a very great hypocrite. Christianity seems to be now thought even below these gentlemen's ridi. cule, as I never almost hear a sneer against it. There is an insolence and a daring effrontery in this which is extremely provoking. But what hurts me most is the emphatic silence of those who should be supposed to hold very different sentiments on these subjects. The world supposes that no man will tamely hear sentiments ridiculed which he holds as the most deeply interesting and sacred, without expressing such dissatisfaction as would effectually prevent any gentleman of tolerable good breeding from repeating the insult, or at least, that he would endeavour to retort the ridicule, if he was not conscious of the weakness of his cause. Till within these thirty years, the wit was generally on the side of religion. I do not remember any man of the least pretensions to genius in Britain, who ever thought of subverting every principle of natural religion till of late. And if the present spirit is not very speedily checked, I am confident it will give the finishing stroke to that corruption of heart and principles which make such an alarming progress. It is not worth while to say, after this, that it will as certainly and speedily suppress all great efforts of genius and imagination. You are the best man I know to chastise these people as they deserve. You have more philosophy and more wit than will be necessary for the purpose, though you can never employ any of them in so good a cause."

In June 1767, Dr. Beattie married the daughter of Dr. Dun, the rector of the grammar school at Aberdeen. This connexion, he naturally supposed, would lay the basis of domestic felicity; and so, for a short time, it did; but the unfortunate lady inherited from her mother the most dreadful distemper to which the human frame is subject; and her disordered intellects, in a few years, proved a source of unspeakable misery to her husband. About this time, he perused some of the miscellaneous works of Rousseau; and his critical remarks on two or three of them, contained in the following letter to the Rev. James Williamson, dated October 1767, are highly judicious.

"I have been studying Rousseau's miscellanies of late. His Epistle to D'Alembert,' on theatrical exhibitions, I think excellent, and perfectly decisive. His discourse on the effects of the sciences is spirited to a high degree, and contains much matter of melancholy meditation: I am not so much of his mind in regard to the origin of inequality among mankind, though I think the piece on this subject has been much misunderstood by critics, and misrepresented by wits. Even by his own confession, it is rather a jeu d'esprit than a philosophical inquiry; for he owns that the natural state, such as he represents it, did probably never take place, and probably never will; and if it had taken place, he seems to think it impossible that mankind should ever have emerged from it without some very extraordinary alteration in the course of nature.

Farther,

ther, he says, that this natural state is not the most advantageous for man; for that the most delightful sentiments of the human mind could not exert themselves till man had relinquished his brutal and solitary nature, and become a domestic animal. At this period, and previous to the establishment of property, he places the age most favourable to human happiness; which is just what the poets have done before him, in their description of the golden age. So that his system is not that preposter. ous thing it has been represented. Yet he says many things in this treatise to which I cannot agree. His solitary and savage man is too much of a brute; and many of his observations are founded on facts not well ascertained, and very ambiguous in their meaning. There is a little treatise of his which he calls a letter to Mr. Voltaire, which-I read with much pleasure, as I found it to be a transcript of my own sentiments in regard to Pope's maxim, Whatever is, is right.'"

It is well known that though Rousseau's discourse on the sciences gained the prize offered by the Academy of Dijon, it was the original intention of the author to take up the opposite side of the question, and to contend that the sciences had been productive of the happiest effects to society. But he was induced to change his design, on finding that the ground was previously occupied, either by D'Alembert, or Diderot, we do not remember which. Dr. Beattie's critical talents certainly appear to advantage in his remarks on Voltaire's Henriade, a poem the merit of which has always appeared to us to have been greatly over-rated.

"I promised to give you my opinion of the Henriade; but I must premise, that I take it for granted you have not implicitly adopted the notions of the French critics with regard to this poem. I hear it is accounted by them the greatest poem that ever human wit produced in any age or nation. For my part, I judge of it without prejudice either for or against it, and as I would judge of Tasso's Gerusalemme,' or any other work, in whose fate I have no national concern.

"Among the beauties of this work I would reckon its style, which, though raised above prose as much as the genius of the language will permit, is yet elegant and simple, though sometimes, to one accustomed to English poetry, it may have the appearance of being too prosaic.-' Ou plutôt en effet Valois ne regnait plus' Henri scait prôfiter de ce grand avantage C'est un usage antique et sacre parmi nous'-' De Paris à l'instant il fait ouvrir la porte-and many others, have no thing to distinguish them from the flattest prose but the measure and rhyme but I do not insist on this as a fault; for the same objection might be made to the finest poems in the world; and I know not whether a flatness of this kind may not sometimes have a good effect, and heighten, as it were, the relief of the more distinguished parts. The versification of the Henriade' is agreeable, and often more harmonious than one could expect, who has not a greater niceness of ear in regard to the French numbers than I can pretend to have. I know not whence it happens, that I, who am very sensible of the Greek, Latin, and Italian harmony, can never bring myself to relish that of the French,

A 24

although

although I understand the French language as well as any of the others. Is it true, as Rousseau asserts, that this language, on account of the incessant monotony of the pronunciation, is incapable of harmony? I should like to have your sentiments on this subject.

"The thoughts or reflections in this poem are not too much crowded, nor affectedly introduced; they are in general proper and nervous, frequently uncommon. The author evidently appears to be a man of wit, yet he does not seem to take any pains to appear so.

"The fable is distinct, perspicuous, and intelligible; the character of Henry historically just; and the description of particular objects apposite,, and sometimes picturesque.

"But his descriptions are often of too general a nature, and want that minuteness which is necessary to interest a reader. They are rather historical than poetical descriptions. This is no verbal distinction; there is real ground for it. An historian may describe from hearsay; a poet must describe from seeing and experience; and this he is enabled to do by making use of the eye of imagination. What makes a description natural? It is such a selection of particular qualities as we think that we ourselves would have made, if we had been spectators of the object. What makes a description picturesque? It is a selection, not of every circumstance or quality, but of those which most powerfully attract the notice and influence, the affections and imagination of the spectator. In a word, a poet must, either in vision or reality, be a spectator of the objects he undertakes to describe: an historian (being confined to truth) is generally supposed to describe from hearsay; or if he describe what he has seen, he is not at liberty to insert one circumstance, and omit another, magnify this, and diminish that, bring one forward, and throw the other into the back ground; he must give a detail of all the circumstances, as far as he knows them, otherwise he is not a faithful historian. Now, I think, through the whole of this poem, Voltaire shows himself more of a histo rian than a poet; we understand well enough what he says, but his representations, for the most part, are neither picturesque nor affecting.

"To one who has read the second book of Virgil, Voltaire's massacre of St. Bartholomew will appear very trifling. It is uninteresting and void of incident; the horrors of it arise only upon reflection; the imagination is not terrified, though the moral sense disapproves. The parting of Henry and Mad. D'Estrees is another passage that disappointed me; it is expressed in a few general terms, that produce no effect. The part of Dido and Æneas, of Armida and Rinaldo, are incomparably fine, and do as far exceed that of Henry and his paramour, as the thunder of heaven transcends the mustard-bowl of the play-house.

"There is hardly an attempt at character in the poem. That of Henry is purely historical; and, though well enough supported on the whole, is not placed in those difficult and trying circumstances, which draw forth into action the minuter springs of the soul. Before I get to the end of the Iliad, I am as much acquainted with Homer's heroes as if I had been personally known to them all for many years; but of Voltaire's hero I have only a confused notion. I know him to be brave and amorous, a lover of his country, and affectionate to his friends; and this is all I know of him, and I could have learned as much from a common newspaper.

"I acknow.

"I acknowledge Voltaire's fable to be perspicuous, but I think it uninteresting, especially towards the end. We foresee the event, but our expectations are not raised by it. The catastrophe is not brought about by any striking incident, but by a series of incidents that have little or nothing in them to engage or surprize the reader. Henry's conversion is a very poor piece of work. Truth descends from heaven to the king's tent, with a veil over her, which she removes by little and little, till at length her whole person appears in a glorious, but undazzling lustre. This may be good philosophy, but it is very indifferent poetry. It affects not the imagination, nor reconciles the reader to the event.— Henry is converted, but we know not how or why. The catastrophe of Don Quixote is similar to this. Both Cervantes and Voltaire seem to have been in a haste to conclude; and this is all the apology I can offer for them.

"I mention not Voltaire's confusion of fabulous and real personages in his machinery; this has been remarked by others. But I cannot help observing, that his invocation to the historic muse is extremely injudicious. It warns the reader to expect nothing but truth, and consequently every appearance of fiction in the sequel must produce a bad effect, and bear the mark of improbability, which it would not have borne, if our author had been content to follow the example of his predecessors. Virgil pretends no better authority than tradition, sit mihi fas audita loqui; and Homer throws himself entirely upon his muse, and is satisfied in being the instrument through which she speaks. The dream in the Seventh Canto (which the French critics think superior in merit to the whole Iliad) disappointed me much, though, in some few passages, it is not amiss. But heaven is not the element of poets. St. Louis's prayer, in the last Canto, is an odd one. He treats his Maker very cavalierly, and almost threatens him. I observed in the Henriade,' some mixed and some improper metaphors, but did not mark them. One, however, occurs- L'Eternel à ses voeux se laissa penetrer.' On the whole, I am very much of Denina's mind with regard to this poem. Se nell Enriade non si trovano molti passaggi pieni di affetti nè molte orazioni forti e gagliarde, e che esprimano il carattere di chi parla, nè quella ubertà d'imagini e di tratti vivi e sorprendenti d'immaginazione, come in Omero, Virgilio, Ariosto, Tasso e Milton, non vi son neppure le superfluità nè le stravaganze che in alcuni di questi si notano; e chicchessia può con gusto, e soddisfazione leggere l'Enriade senza saziarsi; vantaggio, che l'autore dee riconoscere dalla vivacità e forza del suo stile, e dall' energia de' suoi versi.'

"Reserve is the bane of friendly intercourse, the screen of error, and the support of prejudice. I have, therefore, spoken freely on this occa sion, because I would willingly embrace every opportunity of rectifying my errors, and putting myself in the way of information. If you ap prove of my sentiments, I shall believe them right; if not, I shall care. fully review and correct them. I flatter myself I am of no country, but a citizen of the world. I have received much entertainment from the works of Voltaire; but I do not admire him much in his critical capacity. I know Mrs. Boyd will support me in this; for she understands and admires Shakespeare, who seems to be the object of Voltaire's envy in a particular degree."

We