Ballad of a Friar of Orders Grey, in Percy's Reliques

of English Poetry.

His Traveller was, it is said, pronounced by Mr. Fox to be one of the finest pieces in the English language. Perhaps this sentence was delivered by that great man with some qualification, which was either forgotten or omitted by the reporter of it; otherwise such praise was surely disproportioned to its object.

In this poem, he professes to compare the good and evil which fall to the share of those different nations whose lot he contemplates. His design at setting out is to shew that, whether we consider the blessings to be derived from art or from nature, we shall discover "an equal portion dealt to all mankind." And the conclusion which he draws at the end of the poem would be perfectly just, if these premises were allowed him.

In every government though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings or tyrant laws restrain,
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,

Our own felicity we make or find:

With secret course, which no loud streams annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel,

Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel,
To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith, and conscience, all our own.

That it matters little or nothing to the happiness of men whether they are governed well or ill, whether they live under fixed and known laws, or at the will of an arbitrary tyrant, is a paradox, the fallacy of which is happily too apparent to need any refutation. Nor is his inference warranted by those particular observations which he makes for the purpose of establishing it. When of Italy he tells us, "that sensual bliss is all this nation knows," how is Italy to be compared either with itself when it was prompted by those "noble aims," of which he speaks, or with that country where he sees

The lords of human kind pass by,

Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band,
By forms unfashion'd, fresh from nature's hand,
Fierce in their native hardiness of soul,

True to imagined right, above controul;
While e'en the peasant learns these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man?

That good is every where balanced by some evil, none will deny. But that no effort of human courage or prudence can make one scale preponderate over the other, and that a decree of fate has fixed them in eternal equipoise, is an opinion which, if it were seriously entertained, must bind men to a tame and spiritless acquiescence in whatever disadvantages or inconveniences they may chance to find themselves involved, and leave to them the exercise of no other public virtue than that of a blind submission.

His poetry is happily better than his argument. He discriminates with much skill the manners of the several countries that pass in review before him; the illustrations, with which he relieves and varies his main subject, are judiciously interspersed; and as he never raises his tone too far beyond his pitch at the first starting, so he seldom sinks much below it. The thought at the beginning appears to have pleased him; for he has repeated it in "the Citizen of the World:"

Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,
My heart untravel'd fondly turns to thee;
Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain,
And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.

"The further I travel, I feel the pain of separation with stronger force; those ties that bind me to my native country and you are still unbroken. By every remove I only drag a greater length of chain."

To the poetical compositions of Goldsmith, in general, may be applied with justice that temperate commendation which he has given to the works of Parnell in his life of that Poet. "At the end of his course the reader regrets that his way has been so short; he wonders that it gave him so little trouble; and so resolves to go the journey over again." There is much to solace fatigue and even to excite pleasure, but nothing to call forth rapture. We stay to contemplate and enjoy the objects on our

road; but we feel that it is on this earth we have been travelling, and that the author is either not willing or not able to raise us above it. No writer in the English language has combined such various excellences as a novelist, a writer of comedies, and a poet.

ERASMUS DARWIN.

ERASMUS, the seventh child and fourth son of Robert Darwin, Esq. by his wife Elizabeth Hill, was born at Elston, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, on the 12th of December 1731. He was educated at the Grammar school of Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, under the Rev. Mr. Burrows, and from thence sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he had for his tutor Dr. Powell, afterwards Master of the College, to whose learning and goodness, Mason, another of his pupils, has left a testimony in one of his earliest poems.

After proceeding Bachelor in Medicine at Cambridge, Darwin went to Edinburgh, in order to pursue his studies in that science to more advantage. When he had been there long enough to entitle him to the degree of Doctor in Medicine, he quitted Edin

burgh, and began his practice at Nottingham, but soon after (in 1756) removed to Lichfield. In the following year he married Mary, daughter of Charles Howard, Esq. a proctor in the Ecclesiastical Court of Lichfield. He was very soon distinguished for his professional skill. The first case which he treated with so much success as to attract the public notice, was that of a young man of fortune, who, being in a fever, was given over by his ordinary physician, but whom Darwin restored, probably by one of those bold measures from which others would have shrunk, but to which he wisely had recourse whenever a desperate malady called for a desperate cure. His patient, whose name was Inge, was, I believe, the same whom Johnson, in his life of Ambrose Phillips, has termed a gentleman of great eminence in Staffordshire. Part of the wealth that now flowed in upon him, from an extensive and opulent circle, was employed with that liberality which in this country is perhaps oftener exercised by men of his profession than by those of any other.

At Lichfield, he formed an intimacy with several persons, who afterwards rose to much distinction. Of these, the most remarkable were Mr. Edgeworth, whose skill in mechanics made him acceptable to Darwin; Mr. Day, a man remembered to more advantage by his writings, than by the singularities of his conduct; and Anna Seward, the female most eminent