observing, that the author's mother being buried on the
23rd of January, 1759, there is an admirable paper occasioned by that
event, on Saturday, the 27th of the same month, No. 41. The reader, if
he pleases, may compare it with another fine paper in the Rambler, No.
54, on the conviction that rushes on the mind at the bed of a dying
friend.

"Rasselas," says sir John Hawkins, "is a specimen of our language
scarcely to be paralleled; it is written in a style refined to a degree
of immaculate purity, and displays the whole force of turgid eloquence."
One cannot but smile at this encomium. Rasselas, is, undoubtedly, both
elegant and sublime. It is a view of human life, displayed, it must be
owned, in gloomy colours. The author's natural melancholy, depressed, at
the time, by the approaching dissolution of his mother, darkened the
picture. A tale, that should keep curiosity awake by the artifice of
unexpected incidents, was not the design of a mind pregnant with better
things. He, who reads the heads of the chapters, will find, that it is
not a course of adventures that invites him forward, but a discussion of
interesting questions; reflections on human life; the history of Imlac,
the man of learning; a dissertation upon poetry; the character of a wise
and happy man, who discourses, with energy, on the government of the
passions, and, on a sudden, when death deprives him of his daughter,
forgets all his maxims of wisdom, and the eloquence that adorned them,
yielding to the stroke of affliction, with all the vehemence of the
bitterest anguish. It is by pictures of life, and profound moral
reflection, that expectation is engaged, and gratified throughout the
work. The history of the mad astronomer, who imagines that, for five
years, he possessed the regulation of the weather, and that the sun
passed, from tropic to tropic, by his direction, represents, in striking
colours, the sad effects of a distempered imagination. It becomes the
more affecting when we recollect, that it proceeds from one who lived in
fear of the same dreadful visitation; from one who says emphatically:
"Of the uncertainties in our present state, the most dreadful and
alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason." The inquiry into the
cause of madness, and the dangerous prevalence of imagination, till, in
time, some particular train of ideas fixes the attention, and the mind
recurs constantly to the favourite conception, is carried on in a strain
of a