raised me to any honours of the gown, which
are often given to men of as little learning, and less honesty, than
myself."

How feelingly Whitehead paints the situation of Dryden in his old
age:--

Yet lives the man, how wild soe'er his aim,
Would madly barter fortune's smiles for fame?
Well pleas'd to shine, through each recording page,
The hapless Dryden of a shameless age!

Ill-fated bard! where'er thy name appears,
The weeping verse a sad memento bears;
Ah! what avail'd the enormous blaze between
Thy dawn of glory and thy closing scene!
When sinking nature asks our kind repairs,
Unstrung the nerves, and silver'd o'er the hairs;
When stay'd reflection came uncall'd at last,
And gray experience counts each folly past!

MICKLE'S version of the Lusiad offers an affecting instance of the
melancholy fears which often accompany the progress of works of
magnitude, undertaken by men of genius. Five years he had buried
himself in a farm-house, devoted to the solitary labour; and he closes
his preface with the fragment of a poem, whose stanzas have
perpetuated all the tremblings and the emotions, whose unhappy
influence the author had experienced through the long work. Thus
pathetically he addresses the Muse:--

----Well thy meed repays thy worthless toil;
Upon thy houseless head pale want descends
In bitter shower; and taunting scorn still rends
And wakes thee trembling from thy golden dream:
In vetchy bed, or loathly dungeon ends
Thy idled life----

And when, at length, the great and anxious labour was completed, the
author was still more unhappy than under the former influence of his
foreboding terrors. The work is dedicated to the Duke of Buccleugh.
Whether his Grace had been prejudiced against the poetical labour by
Adam Smith, who had as little comprehension of the nature of poetry as
becomes a political economist, or from whatever cause, after
possessing it for six weeks the Duke had never condescended to open
the volume. It is to the honour of Mickle that the Dedication is a
simple respectful inscription, in which the poet had not compromised
his dignity,--and that in the second edition he had the magnanimity
not to withdraw the dedication to this statue-like patron. Neither was
the critical reception of this splendid labour of five devoted years
grateful to the sensibility of the author: he writes to a friend--

"Though my work is well received at Oxford, I will hones