MONTHLY MIRROR,

FOR

MAY, 1803.

Embellished with

A PORTRAIT OF MR. EMERY, OF COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE, ENGRAVED BY RIDLEY, FROM AN ORIGINAL PAINTING BY ALLINGHAM.

PRINTED FOR THE PROPRIETORS,

By J. Wright, Mo, 20, Denmark-Court, Strand,

And published by VERNOR and HOOD in the Poultry;

Sold, also, by all the Booksellers in

the United Kingdom.

1803.

A Portrait of Mr. Mathews, the favourite Comedian, of the Theatre Royal Haymarket, will shortly appear.

The Biographical Sketch of Mr. EMERY in our next.

The contents of the article signed ROBERT, from Sunderland, have been mostly anticipated by JULIUS, in his account of the same company at Newcastle.

Sir Henry Wotton on Queen Elizabeth, communicated by J. H. shall appear next Month.

We thank VERITAS (Birmingham) but the private theatrical performances at Birmingham are not an object about which the public can have any curiosity. The letter of C. H. did not arrive in time for this month.

W. R.'s note on a passage in Love's Labour's lost, the first opportunity.

We have received Numbers V. and VI. of Melancholy Hours, which shall immediately appear.

We have received a printed address from Dr. Trismegistus Catbar phlebotemnemeticoglyster us to the inhabitants of Stamford, but the meaning of it we are at a loss to comprehend, and must therefore decline inserting it.

The two "poetical blossoms," from Cambridge, by JUVENIS, are not suffi→ ciently matured to encounter the rough gale of criticism.

We lament exceedingly the omission of Miss HOLFORD's concluding stanza to her very animated and elegant Ode to Time, but she might have assured herself that it could have originated only in a mistake, and might, consequently, have spared an observation, in her letter, which we think too unworthy of the writer to merit any reply.

The hint by E. A. P. (Stamford) in our next.

J. T.'s poetical favour is under consideration.

The Refuge, by MELMOTH, is not sufficiently striking.

We have the pleasure to announce the speedy publication of Clifton Grove, and other poems, from the pen of Mr. Henry Kirk White, of Nottingham.

ERRATUM IN OUR LAST,

Page 250, line 7, for retrogade read retrograde.

MONTHLY MIRROR,

FOR

MAY, 1803.

OBSERVATIONS

ON STERNE, ON MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES, ON MADAN'S THELYPTHORA, & LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS.

STERNE, in his Tristram Shandy, by way of excuse for the freedom of his own pen, mentions the indecency of a grave German professor numbering the amorous exploits of a sparrow. I thought this, like the Latin dissertation on noses, had been a creature of Yorick's imagination; but I found the passage in the notes on the Carmina Priapeia, where the German commentators have investi. gated the indecencies of antiquity with an accuracy truly astonishing; and whence probably Sterne took it, unless he found it where I have since found it, in the bookseller's Biographical Dictionary, under the article Scioppius. The words are: "Cum Ingolstadii agerem, vidi regione musæi mei passerem coitum vicies repetentem, et inde adeo ad languorem datum, ut avolatus in terram deciderat."

I suppose few writers have done more injury to morals than Sterne. By blending sentiments of benevolence and delicacy with immorality and looseness, he induces some people to think that debauchery may be innocent, and adultery meritorious. Since his time, novel-writers try to corrupt the principle* as well as to seduce the imagination. Formerly, if a man felt a passion for the wife or the mistress of his friend, he was conscious at least that, if he persisted in the pursuit, he was acting wrong; and if the novel-writer invented such a character, it was to hold him out as an object of detestation and punishment. Now this is so varnished over with delicate attachment and generous sensibility, that the most shocking acts of perfidy and seduction are committed not only without remorse, but

Many of the heroines of the best modern novels seem to hold the opinion of certain ladies mentioned in the history of John Bull, concerning the indispensable duty of cuckoldom.

with self-complacency; for we are always ready to find causes of palliation for those crimes we are addicted to, and to bend our con⭑ science to our inclination. Sterne has shewn this in a most incomparable sermon. O si omnia sic!

Much has been said against the Fable of the Bees. Indeed the book on its first publication was presented by the grand jury of Middlesex. The treatise of Mr. Madan, called Thelyphthora, and Lord Chesterfield's Letters, have been equally the subject of popular deprecation; so much so, that an attempt to vindicate them will seem to originate from a love of paradox. But let us coolly examine the real tendency of each.

The plain intent of the Fable of the Bees, is to destroy the fine and specious theory of the dignity of human nature, so much insisted on in the writings of the pedantic Shaftesbury. Mandeville appeals boldly to the heart. The opposers of his hypothesis evade the force of this appeal, by deterring his readers from answering it candidly; as they roundly assert, that whoever, after examining his own feelings, acquiesces in the doctrine, bears himself testimony to the depravity of his own heart. This is a favourite argument of Fielding, who of all men should have been the last to urge it, as, in his inimitable portraits of human life, the good characters bear a very small proportion to the bad. Let any person read with an unprejudiced mind, the apology of Mandeville for the Fable of the Bees, and then fairly say if he thinks him wrong in all the motives to which he imputes human actions.

But the most surprising thing of all is, that divines should have taken such universal offence at a book which supports one of the tenets of our religion, the natural corruption of human nature, unless assisted by divine grace. I do not mean to argue like a methodist; but, assuredly, whoever depends for victory on arms which he fancies he possesses, when in fact he does not possess them, will certainly experience defeat. When the love of fame, and the dread of disgrace, are held up to mankind, we know they are capable of making any exertion, and undergoing any danger or pain; and these motives have at least as often animated the resolution of the soldier, and steeled the nerves of the martyr, as disinterested patriotism and pure religion. To know if virtue acts on principle alone, we must place her in other situations. Suppose a man, tempted by the most seductive of all passions, and certain that the gratification of that passion, though a breach of the laws of gratitude and hospitality, will be also the path to safety and to honour,

while the rejection of it will involve him in ruin and disgrace, and ask what the bare principle of conscious virtue would avail him, in a case where the exertion of that virtue could never be known, without the idea that he was acting under the eye of an omniscient Being, to whom he was responsible for his actions, and enquiring of himself, “How shall I do this thing, and sin against God?” I would much sooner trust my life, my property, and my honour, in the hands of him who feels his weakness, than in those of him who confides in his imaginary strength; or, what is more common, who boasts of a strength which his conscience whispers to him he does not possess; for, though the humble tax-gatherer was sincere, the insolent pharisee was an hypocrite.

As for Thelyphthora, the whole argument amounts to this, and it is to me unanswerable. If marriage is a divine institution, the essential nature of it cannot be altered by human laws. Human laws may prescribe with what forms, and on what conditions, the legal relation of husband and wife, father and son, shall be enjoyed as to their civil rights, in the country where those laws are in force; but as for their real relation in the eye of God, and their natural rights, it is impossible for the power of any legislature to make that an act of fornication and adultery to-day, which was a solemn and religious rite yesterday. There was this very judicious argument ad hominem, used against the author, in one of the Reviews "How would you like to have your daughter married, otherwise than by the legal ceremony of the church of England?" He might just as well ask a strenuous advocate for parliamentary reform, whether he would choose to be returned for Manchester or Old Sarum, in the present parliament.

Lord Chesterfield's Letters are, on the whole, well calculated to lead a young man to a polite and amiable deportment. If he ́dwells too much on the minutiae of this, it betrays a frivolity of mind. If he insists on making a man an ambassador, who was destined by nature for a fellow of a college, it shews an obstinate adherence to a favourite point. But omitting one instance, in which he tries to make his Cymon grow polished by falling in love, and where he a little oversteps the decorum of parental admonition, the general tendency of the book is by no means immoral, as Lord Chesterfield says more than once in the course of his letters, "I omit insisting on the duties of virtue and morality, as without them no man can be endured." H. J. P.