called his great things. His Ode which begins

"Ruin seize thee, ruthless King,
Confusion on thy banners wait!"

has been celebrated for its abruptness, and plunging into the subject
all at once. But such arts as these have no merit, unless when they are
original. We admire them only once; and this abruptness has nothing new
in it. We have had it often before. Nay, we have it in the old song of
Johnny Armstrong:

"Is there ever a man in all Scotland
From the highest estate to the lowest degree," &c.

And then, Sir,

"Yes, there is a man in Westmoreland,
And Johnny Armstrong they do him call."

There, now, you plunge at once into the subject. You have no previous
narration to lead you to it. The two next lines in that Ode are, I
think, very good:

"Though fann'd by conquest's crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state."'

Finding him in a placid humour, and wishing to avail myself of the
opportunity which I fortunately had of consulting a sage, to hear whose
wisdom, I conceived in the ardour of youthful imagination, that men
filled with a noble enthusiasm for intellectual improvement would gladly
have resorted from distant lands;--I opened my mind to him ingenuously,
and gave him a little sketch of my life, to which he was pleased to
listen with great attention.

I acknowledged, that though educated very strictly in the principles
of religion, I had for some time been misled into a certain degree of
infidelity; but that I was come now to a better way of thinking, and was
fully satisfied of the truth of the Christian revelation, though I was
not clear as to every point considered to be orthodox. Being at
all times a curious examiner of the human mind, and pleased with an
undisguised display of what had passed in it, he called to me with
warmth, 'Give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you.' He then began
to descant upon the force of testimony, and the little we could know of
final causes; so that the objections of, why was it so? or why was it
not so? ought not to disturb us: adding, that he himself had at one
period been guilty of a temporary neglect of religion, but that it was
not the result of argument, but mere absence of thought.

After having given credit to reports of his bigotry, I was agreeably
surprized when he expressed the following very liberal sentiment, which
has the additional value of obviating an objection to our holy religion,
founded upon