endeavour to dissuade the duke of Marlborough from making this general offer, and inform him what he was sure the elector would ask: that he was of a rigid temper, and would not brook the refusal, if that should happen to be the case? "Did the pensioner offer to come into the queen's measures, if she would assure them she had no private treaty with France? If she would give them (the Dutch) a share in the Assiento Contract, and the south-sea ship, and send an ambassador to relieve the earl of Strafford, who had shocked them par ses manieres dures et hautaines." FOR THE PORT FOLIO. LORD HERVEY ON MR. POPE. MR. OLDSCHOOL, THE sarcasms of Pope against lord Hervey are in every body's hands; and from them we are led to suppose, that lord Hervey was a flippant, flimsy versifier, who penned smooth rhymes for the amusement of the wits of quality, without sense, or poetry, or force. "Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day." But Pope, an unprincipled, malicious calumniator of talents of every description, himself ignorant of every thing but the knack of smooth versification, sometimes indeed, though rarely, illumined by the beams of true poetry, could not but have felt the following biting satire, by lord Hervey, which I fancy will be new to many of your readers. T. C. Carlisle, TO THE IMITATOR OF THE SATIRE OF THE SECOND BOOK OF HORACE. In two large columns on the motley page, Where ribaldry to satire makes pretence, And modern scandal rolls with ancient sense; And on the other, how he never wrote; That spirit he attempts to imitate, Than heretofore that Greek he did translate? Whilst none thy crabbed numbers can endure- If he have thorns, they all on roses grow; The object of thy spleen is human kind: *But if thou seest a great and generous heart, Not only justice vainly we demand; To this or that alike in vain we trust, It was the equity of righteous Heaven, 'That one so odious should be born to hate! But oh! the sequel of the sentence dread, And whilst you bruise their heel, beware your head. Nor think thy weakness shall be thy defence, As 'tis to libel those who cannot write: If none with vengeance yet thy crimes pursue, Thus 'tis with thee: whilst impotently safe, The deathless satire and immortal song? But whilst that armour thy poor corpse defends, And scorned in prose him whom they praised in verse; Then whilst with coward-hand you stab a name, And try at least t'assassinate our fame, Like the first base assassin's be thy lot, But as thou hat'st, be hated by mankind, And with the emblem of thy crooked mind Marked on thy front, like Cain, by God's own hand, Wander, like him, accursed through the land. I do not recollect any specimen of poetical asperity superior to these severe verses of lord Hervey; an antagonist by no means worthy of being treated so slightingly as Pope affects to treat him. They are certainly superior to Churchill's Epistle to Hogarth. At the reference* lord Hervey alludes to "Taste," an epistle. At the passage brings to my mind the following very bitter epigram. Quand l'Eternal non sans remords, NOTES OF A DESULTORY READER-FOR THE PORT FOLIO. THAT stumbling block of philosophy, the reconcilement of evil with the omnipotence and benevolence of the Deity, is made use of by Lucretius, for the purpose of sustaining his comfortless hypothesis, that man and his concerns, instead of being the care of a divine intelligence, are merely the sport of a blind and capricious destiny. Cum jam per terras frondent atque omnia florent, Aut nimiis torret fervoribus Æthereus Sol, These are a few of his lines on the subject; and, as for want of the book, I cannot say, "take them in the words of Creech," with Mr. Pope, I thus endeavour to give them in my own: Oft when creative Spring renews the shade, And Death's fell darts are immaturely hurl❜d. But besides the dreary effects of this opinion upon the mind of him who entertains it, its mischievous influence on society, is forcibly illustrated in the Anti-Lucretius of the Abbe de Polignac, written in Latin, verse. From a translation of it in the Gentleman's Magazine, I select a few passages in answer to this deplorable doctrine, which flourished during the progress of the French revolution, and which, though at present discountenanced through policy, there is too much reason to fear, the still perturbed state of the civilized world, fertile in examples of depressed virtue and triumphant guilt, has a tendency to nourish and inculcate. Who'er shall drink these poisons from thy springs, Hot in tumultuous youth, and fierce of soul, 'Tis guiltless liberty to trample law, 'Tis more, 'tis duty, sin a sanction gains, And now no crime but honesty remains. Owing probably to the reporters of parliamentary eloquence, substituting from memory the substance instead of the words of |