CHAP. that, after three coffee-houses had bought one a-piece, not two more would be sold.

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That poverty is the best nurse of talent has long been a most humiliating truism; and the fountain of the Muses, bursting from a barren rock, is but too apt an emblem of the hard source, from which much of the genius of this world has issued. How strongly the young translators of Aristænetus were under the influence of this sort of inspiration, appears from every paragraph of Halhed's letters, and might easily, indeed, be concluded of Sheridan, from the very limited circumstances of his fatherwho had nothing beside the pension of 2007. a year, conferred upon him in consideration of his literary merits, and the little profits he derived from his lectures in Bath, to support with decency himself and his family. The prospects of Halhed were much more golden, but he was far too gay and mercurial to be prudent; and from the very scanty supplies which his father allowed him, had quite as little of "le superflu, chose si nécessaire," as his friend. But whatever were his other desires and pursuits, a visit to Bath, -to that place which contained the two persons he most valued in friendship and in love, -was the grand object of all his financial speculations; and among other ways and means that, in the delay of the expected resources from

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Aristænetus, presented themselves, was an ex- CHAP. hibition of 201. a-year, which the college had lately given him, and with five pounds of which he thought he might venture "adire Corinthum."

Though Sheridan had informed his friend that the translation was put to press some time in March, 1771, it does not appear to have been given into the hands of Wilkie, the publisher, till the beginning of May, when Mr. Ker writes thus to Bath:-"Your Aristænetus is in the hands of Mr. Wilkie, in St. Paul's Church-yard, and to put you out of suspense at once, will certainly make his appearance about the 1st of June next, in the form of a neat volume, price 3s. or 3s. 6d., as may best suit his size, &c., which cannot be more nearly determined at present. I have undertaken the task of correcting for the press Some of the Epistles that I have perused seem to me elegant and poetical; in others I could not observe equal beauty, and here and there I could wish there were some little amendment. You will pardon this liberty I take, and set it down to the account of oldfashioned friendship." Mr. Ker, to judge from his letters, (which, in addition to their other laudable points, are dated with a precision truly exemplary,) was a very kind, useful, and sen

CHAP. sible person,

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and in the sober hue of his intellect exhibited a striking contrast, to the sparkling vivacity of the two sanguine and impatient young wits, whose affairs he so good-naturedly undertook to negociate.

At length in August, 1771, Aristænetus made its appearance- contrary to the advice of the bookseller, and of Mr. Ker, who represented to Sheridan the unpropitiousness of the season, particularly for a first experiment in authorship, and advised the postponement of the publication till October. But the translators were too eager for the rich harvest of emolument they had promised themselves, and too full of that pleasing but often fatal delusion that calenture, under the influence of which young voyagers to the shores of Fame imagine they already see her green fields and groves in the treacherous waves around them to listen to the suggestions of mere calculating men of business. The first account they heard of the reception of the work was flattering enough to prolong awhile this dream of vanity. "It begins (writes Mr. Ker, in about a fortnight after the publication,) to make some noise, and is fathered on Mr. Johnson, author of the English Dictionary, &c. See to-day's Gazetteer. The critics are admirable in discovering a concealed author by his style, manner, &c."

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Their disappointment at the ultimate failure CHAP. of the book was proportioned, we may suppose, to the sanguineness of their first expectations. But the reluctance, with which an author yields to the sad certainty of being unread, is apparent in the eagerness with which Halhed avails himself of every encouragement for a rally of his hopes. The Critical Reviewers, it seems, had given the work a tolerable character, and quoted the first Epistle.* The Weekly Review in the Public Ledger had also spoken well of it, and cited a specimen. The Oxford Magazine had transcribed two whole Epistles, without mentioning from whence they were taken. Every body, he says, seems to have read the book, and one of those hawking booksellers who attend the coffee-houses assured him it was written by Dr. Armstrong, author of the Economy of Love. On the strength of all this he recommends that another volume of the Epistles should be published immediately being of opinion that the readers of the first volume

* In one of the Reviews I have seen it is thus spoken of:

"No such writer as Aristænetus ever existed in the classic æra; nor did even the unhappy schools, after the destruction of the Eastern empire, produce such a writer. It was left to the latter times of monkish imposition to give such trash as this, on which the translator has ill spent his time. We have been as idly employed in reading it, and our readers will in proportion lose their time in perusing this article."

СНАР.

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would be sure to purchase the second, and that the publication of the second would put it in the heads of others to buy the first. Under a sentence containing one of these sanguine anticipations, there is written, in Sheridan's hand, the word " Quixote !"

They were never, of course, called upon for the second part, and, whether we consider the merits of the original or of the translation, the world has but little to regret in the loss. Aristænetus is one of those weak, florid sophists, who flourished in the decline and degradation of antient literature, and strewed their gaudy flowers of rhetoric over the dead muse of Greece. He is evidently of a much later period than Alciphron, to whom he is also very inferior in purity of diction, variety of subject, and playfulness of irony. But neither of them ever deserved to be wakened from that sleep, in which the commentaries of Bergler, De Pauw, and a few more such industrious scholars have shrouded them.

The translators of Aristænetus, in rendering his flowery prose into verse, might have found a precedent and model for their task in Ben Jonson, whose popular song, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," is, as Mr. Cumberland first remarked, but a piece of fanciful mosaic, collected out of the love-letters of the sophist