a very short time there, he walks quickly back again, without doing me the least injury.

We came here last Wednesday, traveling like the old patriarchs, with all our household, and our herds, and our flocks, (that is, one Alderney cow,) and found this country and our little domain in high bloom and beauty. All our alterations and improvements are now finished, and they answer to admiration. I shall have no peace till you see my walks, and lawns, and groves, and haunted streams, and become as well acquainted with my naiads and my dryads here, as you are with their elder sisters at Fulham.

We heard of your alarm at Cowslip Green, and congratulate you most cordially on your providential escape. We agree entirely with a certain elegant textuary, that it is of the Lord's mercies that you were not consumed.

The Birmingham riot was an unfortunate thing. I do not love any thing so like the savages and the Poissards of France. The mob may sometimes think right, but they always act wrong. I am certainly extremely sorry to see them take the administration of justice into their own hands.

Have you seen the Life of Thomas Paine? if not, pray send for it immediately. It is curious, entertaining, and authentic. That life and the pamphlet (which I enclose to you under another cover,) are the best antidotes I have seen, to the poison of his publication; they ought to be printed in cheap penny pamphlets, and dispersed over the kingdom.

Accept Mrs. Porteus' affectionate compliments, and be assured that no one can entertain for you a more sincere regard than, Dear madam,

Your faithful and devoted servant,

B. LONDON.

TO MRS. H, MORE.-REV. J. NEWTON.

My very dear Madam,-Should I receive a book from some authors, I might perhaps make my acknowledgments immediately, before I had read it, that I might avoid the necessity of intimating my opinion of the performance; but I deferred thanking you for your obliging present, till I could say I had read it ; and this I could not say sooner, for my engagements allow me but very little time for reading. I mean not, however, to tell

Let it suffice that I thank

you

you in detail what I think of it. for it. I thank the Lord for disposing and enabling you to write it-and my heart prays that it may be much read, and that the blessing of the Lord may accompany the perusal, and make it extensively useful; answerable to your benevolent design, and far beyond your expectation. I know you too well to apologize for my freedom when I say that I wished the note, vol. i. page 171, had been omitted. I hoped your just censure of novels would have extended to the proscription of the whole race, without mercy and without exception. Self here will prompt every scribbler to interpret your note in his or her own favor, and to think the author could not mean to condemn him. My novel, he will say, contains accurate histories, striking delineations, &c. From the little I can recollect of what I have read in this line, (perhaps forty years ago,) I am almost ready to judge, that the best are the worst; for had not some been well-written and admired, it is probable we should not have been pestered with the contemptible small fry that followed. I am not sure that I ever read a novelist of note; but I thought Fielding and Richardson did much harm by forming the prevailing taste for novels. The latter is, upon the whole, the more serious; but he could not give a better idea of religion than he had. I suppose a novel cannot well succeed without contrasted characters, and I am afraid that of Lovelace has been more admired than Clarissa's ; and the last words of Lovelace, when he threw up a handful of his blood towards heaven,-Let this expiate,—are a full proof to me that Richardson was no more competent to teach divinity than Fielding. I have heard, likewise, that Mr. Richardson, when asked if he knew an original answerable to his portrait of Sir Charles Grandison, said, he might apply it to Lord Dartmouth, if he was not a Methodist. But, in my opinion the very best of these performances, being addressed merely to the imagination, have a tendency to fill the heads of young people with wind-mills, and indispose them for taking their proper part in the more tame and familiar incidents of common life. I remind myself, and perhaps remind you, of the pedagogue who declaimed on the art of war in the presence of Hannibal-it is a sign I know to whom I am writing, to one who can bear, forbear, and forgive.

I have lately published Memoirs of Mr. Grimshaw; a copy would have waited upon you as a pepper-corn acknowledgment of my regard, and affection, and gratitude, had I well known how to send such a petty affair before I received your present. If it

has the same effect upon my brethren in the ministry, while they read it, that it had upon me while writing it, it will humble and shame them. Such were my feelings for the time; but how often since have the worms of pride and self-conceit lifted up their saucy heads! Ah! why are dust and ashes proud? This seems the strongest feature and proof of our depravity. If you should come into St. Mary's, and hear me using many arguments to dissuade my hearers from thinking themselves ten or twelve feet high, and requesting them to be measured by a rule in my hand, would you not suppose either that I was mad myself, or thought that I was preaching to a company of lunatics?-yet this is a part of my employment, and, what is worse, my good advice is often thrown away, even upon myself.

We go on much in our old way at No. 6: only that I have buried a servant who lived with me sixteen years in London, and a long while at Olney; and in her I have lost a faithful friend-but she, I trust, has gained. My dear Miss Catlett is pretty well. I believe no family is more favored with domestic peace and comfort than ours: the gracious Lord has made my widowed state (which I still feel) as pleasant in temporals as the nature of the case will admit, so that I can think of no addition worth wishing for, if a wish could procure it.— My own health is remarkably good: though I feel some effects of advancing years, I seldom feel them in the pulpit; but I am within four months of seventy-four, and therefore live in daily expectation of some change; when, or how, or in what respects, is not my concern. I have committed myself and my all to the Lord. Pray for me, my dear madam, that I may be able to abide by the surrender I have made, and may not presume either to direct or distrust him.

This is an eventful day! which calls for watchfulness and prayer, for weanedness from the world, and for power from on high, that we may stand fast in the Lord, when all things are shaking around us! O, what a mercy to see all power in heaven and earth exercised by Him who was nailed to the cross for sinners! May we be found among the few who are stand

ing in the breach pleading for mercy. The Lord bless you all, Your affectionate and obliged JOHN NEWTON.

prays

TO A YOUNG LADY,-ON THE MELANCHOLY ARISING FROM A FASTIDIOUS SENSIBILITY.-MISS JEWSBURY.

Young, gifted, and beloved-yet unhappy! Blessed with health, leisure, and competence-yet habitually sad! Wholly your own mistress, and a christian by more than professionyet subject to ennui! Indeed, my dearest this is a sad state of things, though, independent of your own confession, I know it to be one fully possible, and, with characters like your own, very common. Minds of a reflective, and somewhat timid cast, are most liable to the influence of morbid sensibility; they soon begin to look through, rather than upon society, and consequently become disgusted with the construction of it. They serve their pleasures as children do their toys-pull them to pieces in order to ascertain their internal mechanism; and their emotions, as the same children serve rose-buds-open them to accelerate their time of bloom. Without intentional want of benevolence, they feel little towards their fellowcreatures beyond general good-will, or perfect indifference, whilst their affections are few, ardent, arbitrary, and exclusive.

To bring the subject back to a personal point, by quoting an expression of your own, "they live in a little world of their own creation;" which little world, by the way, seldom contains many inhabitants. There is generally much that is interesting in a mind thus constituted, and when religious principle gets firm and influential hold of its energies, the excellence which results is perhaps of a higher kind, than can be engrafted on a weaker, gayer character. This admission is not meant, however, to reconcile you to a state of feeling at once unnatural and indefensible: the world might as well be one universal church-yard, as a world of fastidious, exclusive, sensitive beings, who hold their spirits as the streamer does its direction, at the will of every fluttering breeze. But as you have applied to me for counsel, I wish, like a prudent physician, to gain your confidence in the outset; to prove that I understand your case, before I bid you follow my prescriptions. From me, too, you are assured of affectionate sympathy, not merely because I love you, but because I myself lived many years under the star of melancholy, and therefore know, from personal experience, its pains, its pleasures, and its penalties. I know, too, something of a happier state, and with care and attention, (you must allow me to keep up the physician's phrase,) so, I doubt not,

will you. In one sense you are sensible of the numberless and solid comforts you enjoy; in another, you are blind to them: never having known their loss, you esteem them matters of course, and they do not produce excitement. You have, on the other hand, some drawbacks, a few annoyances; and to these you are not so torpid as you are to the blessings; these excite positive irritation and weariness, and by proving to you that life does not lie in fairy land, make you sometimes wish there were no life at all. Day after day creeps on, divided between irksome submission to ordinary, and therefore disagreeable duties, vain dreams of a fancied existence, fraught with interest and free from alloy, whilst the pleasures really in accordance with your own tastes, fail to satisfy, because you expect too much from them. In the Edens of your own making you cease to be "emparadised." Ah! my love, whence is all this? One short and simple answer will suffice, even that which accounts for all human error, and human unhappiness—you have forgotten the true end of life; silently, and unconsciously, you have disconnected it from eternity, and therefore its beauty has no bloom, and there is no balm for its disquietudes.

Much has been said, and strikingly said, of the painful contrast between romance and reality; but simile, instance and allegory, are all in vain, unless the Spirit of Truth accompany both writer and reader. May that Spirit, dearest though now it seems an eclipsed sun, again shine "into your heart, and make its wilderness rejoice and blossom as the rose." When I think of your real circumstances, I wish it were the extravagant hyperbole it appears, to apply such a phrase to one so young, and, as regards real trials, so sheltered. Yet do not suppose I wish to deceive you into gay and thoughtless views; I could paint you a much more melancholy picture of life than you could possibly do for yourself. The only Being who ever promised peace, prefaced that promise with a decided intimation of the world's unutterable vanity.

To speak honestly, I do not think you will ever find a smoother path than the one which you are now treading. You may certainly have some enjoyments added, but others will as certainly be subtracted. With an increase of society consonant to your feelings, your keen zest for it may proportionately diminish or you may have less health, and additional cares. Should you gain more friends, your affection for them may be less ardent, and less confiding. "There is a limit to all our enjoyments, and every desire bears its death in its very gratifi