unger Crebillon and Rousseau. The former writes a licentious novel,
and a young English girl of some fortune and family (a Miss Strafford)
runs away, and crosses the sea to marry him; while Rousseau, the most
tender and passionate of lovers, is obliged to espouse his chambermaid.
If I recollect rightly, this remark was also repeated in the Edinburgh
Review of Grimm's Correspondence, seven or eight years ago.

"In regard 'to the strange mixture of indecent, and sometimes _profane_
levity, which his conduct and language _often_ exhibited,' and which so
much shocks the tone of _Pope_, than the tone of the _time_. With the
exception of the correspondence of Pope and his friends, not many
private letters of the period have come down to us; but those, such as
they are--a few scattered scraps from Farquhar and others--are more
indecent and coarse than any thing in Pope's letters. The comedies of
Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Gibber, &c. which naturally attempted to
represent the manners and conversation of private life, are decisive
upon this point; as are also some of Steele's papers, and even
Addison's. We all know what the conversation of Sir R. Walpole, for
seventeen years the prime-minister of the country, was at his own table,
and his excuse for his licentious language, viz. 'that every body
understood _that_, but few could talk rationally upon less common
topics.' The refinement of latter days,--which is perhaps the
consequence of vice, which wishes to mask and soften itself, as much as
of virtuous civilisation,--had not yet made sufficient progress. Even
Johnson, in his 'London,' has two or three passages which cannot be read
aloud, and Addison's 'Drummer' some indelicate allusions."

* * * * *

To the extract that follows I beg to call the particular attention of
the reader. Those who at all remember the peculiar bitterness and
violence with which the gentleman here commemorated assailed Lord Byron,
at a crisis when both his heart and fame were most vulnerable, will, if
I am not mistaken, feel a thrill of pleasurable admiration in reading
these sentences, such as alone can convey any adequate notion of the
proud, generous pleasure that must have been felt in writing them.

* * * * *

"Poor Scott is now no more. In the exercise of his vocation, he
contrived at last to make himself the subject of a coroner's inquest.
But he died like a brave man, and he l