and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my lodgings; where, during breakfast, he assured me he asked after Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honour for her; and that having a respect for her sister, he designed to have enquired after her, if we had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You must know, Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland; it would have been admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that

manner.

TO THE SAME.

Tunbridge Wells, Sept. the 3rd, 1745.

MY DEAR LADY DUCHESS,

I am extremely happy in Dr. Young's company; he has dined with me sometimes, and the other day rode out with me; he carried me into places suited to the genius of his muse, sublime, grand, and with a pleasing gloom diffased over them; there I tasted the pleasure of his conversation in its full force: his expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and his thoughts of sterl ing sense. I think he is in perfect good health; he practises a kind of philosophical abstinence, but seems not obliged to any rules of physic. All the ladies court him; more because they hear he is a genius, than that they know him to be such. I tell him I am jealous of some ladies that follow him; he says, he trusts my pride will preserve me from jealousy. The Doctor is a true philosopher, and sees how one vice corrects another till an animal, made up of ten

these of Dr.

I have been in the vapours two days, on account Young's leaving us; he was so good as to let me have his company very often, and we used to ride, walk, and take sweet counsel to gether. A few days before he went away he carried Mrs. Rolt (of Hertfordshire) and myself, to Tunbridge, five miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins; but the manner of the journey was admirable, nor did I at the end of it, admire the object

we went to observe more than the

means by which we saw it; and to give your Grace a description of the place without an account of our journey to it, would be contradicting all form and order, and setting myself up as a critic upon all writers of travels. Much Might be said of our passing worth, And manner how we sallied forth

h;

but I shall, as briefly as possible, describe our progress, without dwelling on particular circumstan ces; and shall divest myself of all pomp of language, and proceed in as humble a style as my great subject will admit.-First rode the Doctor on a tall steed, decently eaparisoned in dark grey'; next ambled Mrs. Rolt, on a hackney horse, lean as the famed Rozinante,

but in shape much resembling Sancho's ass; then followed your humble servant on a milk-white palfrey, whose reverence for the human kind induced him to be governed by a creature not half as strong, and, I fear, scarce twice as wise as himself. By this enthusiasm of his, rather than my own skill, I rode on in safety, and at leisure, to observe the company; especially the two figures that brought up the rear. The first was iny servant, valiantly armed with two uncharged pistols; whose holsters were covered with two civil harmless monsters that signified the valour and courtesy of our ancestors. The last was the Doctor's man, whose uncombed hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, one could not help imagining they were of kin, and wishing that for the honour of the family they had had one comb betwixt them; on his head was a velvet cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his side hung a little basket. Thus did we ride, or rather jog on, to Tunbridge town, which is five miles from the wells, To tell you how the dogs barked at us, the children squalled, and the men and women stared, would take up too much time; let it suffice, that not even a tame magpie, or caged starling, let us pass unnoted. At last we arrived at the King's head, where the loyalty of the Doctor induced him to alight, and then, knight errant like, he took his damsels from off their palfreys, and courteously handed us into the inn. We took this progress to see the ruins of an old castle; but first our divine would visit the church yard, where we read that folks were born and died, the natural,

moral, and physical history of mankind. In the church-yard grazed the parson's steed, whose back was worn bare with carrying a pillionseat for the comely, fat personage, this ecclesiastic's wife; and though the creature eat part of the parish, he was most miserably lean....

When we had seen the church, the parson invited us to take some refreshment at his house, but Dr. Young thought we had before enough trespassed on the good man's time, so desired to be excused, else we should, no doubt, have been welcomed to the house by Madam, in her muslin pinners, and sursenet hood; who would have given us some mead, and a piece of cake, that she had made in the Whitsun holidays, to treat her cousins. However, Dr. Young, who would not be outdone in good offices, invited the divine to our inn, where we went to dinner; but he excused himself, and came after the meal was over, in hopes of smoking a pipe; but our Doctor hinted to him that it would not be proper to offer any incense, but sweet praise, to such goddesses as Mrs. Rolt and your humble servant. To say the truth, I saw a large horn tobacco box, with Queen Ann's head upon it, peeping out of his pocket, but I did not care to take the hint, and desire him to put in use that magnificent piece of furniture. walked to the old castle, which was built by Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, in William Rufus's days. It has been a most magnificent building; the situa tion is extremely beautiful; the castle made a kind of a half moon down to the river; and where the river does not defend it, it has been

"

After dinner we

PISAN POETS.

(From Forsyth's Remarks on Italy, &c.)

It was late in the evening before we got home, but the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens, and cast such a light on the earth as showed its beauties in a soft and gentle light. The night silenced all but our divine Doctor, who sometimes uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all nature seems to be hushed and harkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, till I found by my horse's stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and that the blind was leading the blind; so I placed my servant between the Doctor and myself, which he not perceiving, went on in a most philosophical strain to the great amazement of my poor clown of a servant, who not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor making any answer to all the fine things he heard, the Doctor wondering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round, declared his surprise, and desired the man to trot on before; and thus did we return to Tunbridge-Wells. I can give your Grace great comfort in telling you Dr. Young will be with you in a week's time.

In reviewing some of these bards, I shall begin with Pignotti, as he still belongs to Pisa. So little does this elegant fabulist owe to genius, that his very ease, I understand, is the result of severe study; and con

La natura

Parrà che versati habbia da vena Facil versi che costan tanta pena.

Pignotti admires Pope and resembles him. The powers of both seem confined to embellish the thoughts of others; and both have depraved with embellishment the simplicity of the early Greeks.Pope's Homer is much too fine for the original; and Pignotti, for want of Esop's naïveté, has turned his fables into tales. Some of his best novelle are reserved for private circles. I heard him read one on "the art of robbing," which could not be safely published by a Tuscan placeman. In the man himself you see little of the poet, little of that refined satire which runs through his fables, and has raised those light-winged, loose, little things to the rank of Italian classics.

Bertola is perhaps a more ge nuine fabulist than Pignotti. He does not labour to be easy; for he has naturally the negligence and sometimes the vacuity of a rhyming gentleman. His fugitive pieces are as light as the poetical cobwebs of his friend Borgognini. His sonnets run upon love or religion, and some inspire that mystic, unmean

ng tenderness which Petrarch infuses into such subjects. Bertola is too fond of universality and change. He has been a traveller, a monk, a secular priest, a professor in different universities and in different sciences, an historian, a poet, a biographer, a journalist, an improvvisatore.

Bondi has also been bitten by the "estro" of sonnet; but he is more conspicuous, as a painter of manners. His " conversazioni"

and alla moda" expose some genteel follies with great truth of ridicule. His "giornata vilareccia," is diversified, not by the common expedient of episodes, but by a skilful, interchange of rural des scription, good-natured satire, and easy philosophy. The same sub ject has been sung by Melli in Sicilian, which is the doric of Italian poetry, and full of the ancient Theocritan dialect.

Cesarotti is the only Italian now alive (I hope Caiafa will pardon the exclusion) that has shown pow ers equal to an original epic; but those noble powers he has wasted in stooping to paraphrase the sa vage nonsense of Ossian, and in working on Homer's unimprovable rhapsodies. The Iliad he pulls down and rebuilds on a plan of his own. He brings Hector into the very front, and re-moulds the mo rals and decorations of the poem.He retains most of the sublime that flashes through the original; but he has modernized some of its manners, given a certain relief to its simplicity, and suppressed those repetitions peculiar to Homer, and to the literature of the early ágess

Parini has amused, and I hope, corrected his countrymen by the VOL. LVI.

Mattina and Mezzogiorno, for the other two parts of the day he left: imperfect. An original vein of irony runs through all his pictures, and brings into view most of the affections accredited in high life or in fine conversation. He lays on colour enough, yet he seldom caricatures follies beyond their natural distortion. His style is highlypoetical, and, being wrought into trivial subjects, it acquiresa curious charm from the contrast. He is thought inferior to Bettinelli in the structure of blank verse; but the seasoning and pungency of his, themes are more relished here, than themilder instruction of that venerable bard.

Fantoni, better known by his Arcadian name Labindo, is in high favour as a lyric poet. This true man of fashion never tires his fancy by any work of length; he flies from subject to subject, delighted and delighting. You see Horace in every ode, Horace's modes of thinking, his variety of measures, his imagery, his transitions. Labindo wants the Horatian ease; he is too studious of diction, and hazards "some taffeta phrases, silken terms precise," which remind us of our late Della Crusca jargon.

Yet

Pindemonte was connected with some of our English Cruscans, but he cannot be charged with their flimsy, gauzy, glittering nonsense. He thinks, and he makes his readers think. Happy in description, sedate even in his light themes, generally melancholy, and sometimes sublime, he bears a fine re semblance to our Gray, and like Gray, has written but little in a country where most poets are vo luminous.

2 H

Casti is the profligate of genius. He rivals La Fontaine in the narrative talent, and surpasses him in obscenity. His late work, "Gli Animali parlanti," though full of philosophy and gall, must soon yield to the fate of all political poems. Its forms and its agents are tiresome. We can follow a satirical fox through a short fable, but we nauseate three volumes of allegorical brutes connected by one plot. His "novelle " are on the contrary too attractive, too excellently wicked. Such also is their reverend author. He has lived just as he wrote, has grown old in debauchery, and suffered in the cause. Yet Casti is courted and caressed in the first circles of Italy; he is the arbiter of wit, and the favourite of the fair.

IMPROVVISATORI.

(From the Same).

rapidity and command of numbers, which flowed in praise of the fair poetess, and brought her poent back to our applause. Her numbers, however, flowed irregularly, still varying with the fluctuation of sentiment; while her song corresponded, changing from aria to recitativo, from recitativo to a measured recitation.

She went round her circle, and called on each person for a theme. Seeing her busy with her fan, I proposed the Fan as a subject; and this little weapon she painted as she promised, "col pennel divino di fantasia felice." In tracing its origin she followed Pignotti, and in describing its use she acted and analyzed to us all the coquetry of the thing. She allowed herself no pause, as the moment she cooled her estro would escape.

So extensive is her reading that she can challenge any theme. One morning, after other classical subjects had been sung, a Venetian count gave her the boundless field of Apollonius Rhodius, in which she displayed a minute acquaintance with all the argonautic fable. Tired at last of demi-gods, I proposed the sofa for a task, and sketched to her the introduction of Cowper's poem. She set out with his idea, but, being once entangled in the net of mythology, she soon transformed his sofa into a Cytherean couch, and brought Venus, Cupid, and Mars on the scene; for such embroidery enters into the web of every improvvisatore.....

Such "strains pronounced and sung unmeditated, such prompt elegance," such sentiment and imagery flowing in rich diction, in measure, in rhyme, and in music, without interruption, and on ob