He replied, that I had explained myself perfectly well; that he understood me well, and comprehended all my intentions; and that it was not necessary to put them into the form of a memoir; but in saying this he constantly adverted to the treaty and the law. He merely added these words: "We will speak of these matters in private, and will make our representations to his Highness of our sentiments, on which he will decide." During the whole of the conversation he shewed a great contempt of the Germans, and a great store of hatred towards them. For my part, I find that those who are contemptible are the Turks, for losing by their dastardy the finest opportunity in the world; that they have been too tenderly dealt with; and that they ought to be treated with the same rigour with which they treat their subjects. I shall not cease my importunities, more especially as to what concerns Prince Ragotsky.

sustained in the preceding one. The Emperor was for some time alarmed at the movements they are reported to have made on the frontiers of Hungary. I do not know whether they are to be ascribed to the counsels you have given; but, however, you may be aware of the utility of such a diversion; for the good of my service, you should be careful of the maxims you employ to persuade the Turks to re-commence the war. It is not meet to afford room to have it said, on good grounds, that infidels maintain that their law does not permit them to forfeit their engagements without a legitimate cause, and that my ambassador should say that pretexts are sufficient, and that we should recollect we are men, before we fulfil the obligations of the law. Beside the advantage afforded by such principles to a barbarous nation, those who pique themselves on an exact observance of their word are not to be persuaded; independently of which they are very glad to have a pretext to excuse the wish they entertain to remain in tranquillity.

It is a justice due to the Grand Monarque, as he was styled, to say, that immediately after this correspondence, M. de Feriol was recalled, and was succeeded by a more moderate, but equally subtle character, M. Desalleurs.

LITERATURE was but the amusement of this distinguished man's leisure hours, and therefore his character as a writer cannot be greatly affected by any of his necessarily very imperfect compositions on such subjects. His range of reading was but narrow; and of the poetry, the eloquence, and the philosophy of the world of old, he had gathered his knowledge, not from the immortal originals, but from the writings of other men upon them; so that in place of those fine thoughts and sentiments which a mind deeply imbued with the spirit of literature breathes over all its disquisitions-in place of that lofty enthusiasm which springs from the communion between

soul and soul, we find, in the few fragments of philosophical criticism left behind him by this eminent person, little more than cold and formal theory -a few speculations on the products of mind, almost as unimpassioned as those of a political economist on manufactures and trade.

At the same time, such was the native sagacity of the man, that even in his speculations concerning the fine arts, for which it is manifest he had little true feeling, intellect not unfrequently supplies the place of genius, sensibility, and taste; and when he has occasion to treat of those principles of composition which, lying in intellect, are discernible to its ken, Millar

to omit giving us the means of ascer taining what was its value as such, which could only be done by telling us who your "300 noblemen and gentlemen" were. I have heard of no noblemen who were present but Lord Erskine himself and Lord Duncan; and although both you and my tailor, Mr Purves, say it was a splendid assembly, I have my doubts as to what constituted its splendour. The viands, I have no doubt, were as good as could be expected, and the wine was, I hope, tolerable, for I observe there were about thirty bumper toasts drunk, even be fore the chair was abdicated by Mr Maxwell of Carriden, and assumed by a gentleman closely connected with certain rotten boroughs, on the departure of Lord Erskine himself. But as for the eloquence of which you speak so pompously in your preface, really your own narrative will not bear you out; and I can only account for your excessive admiration by supposing, that your brain was heated while you listened, and that in your two or three busy days of redacteurship afterwards, it had not had leisure to regain its natural coolness. The preface is assuredly a most drunken performance. The one sen tence stands quite disjointed from the other throughout. Here you exhibit the dull heavy listlessness of a coma tose wine-bibber-there the sudden start of excitement, as unnatural as what is, in the technical language of taverns, called the second or devil appetite, and then back you sink again in to your helpless doze. But something of this effect may perhaps be set down to the account of your own original unfitness for the great office you have undertaken. Your style, Moses, is naturally hard and barren; and the flowers which you here and there endeavour to rear upon it, are quite out of all place and keeping, and cannot thrive. Cold, dry, and dusty in one page-flaming, exuberant, and bom bastical in the next-always puerile, inept, and feeble,-I wonder what made even the Whigs of Edinburgh choose you for their Thucydides. That Lord Erskine's speech, and that the speeches of many that followed him, might pass pretty well over the bottle, and interspersed and relieved as they were with hip-hip-hip-hurras and fiddles, I have no doubt: but it should have been considered by a set of people who talk so much about the effects

of the press, that the processes of printing and publishing, enable one to judge much more accurately of the value of speeches, than is in the power of those that wash down every sentence they hear with a bumper ;-and you or your employers should have acted according ly. Had you been contented to let the dinner go off as dinners usually do, and merely to chatter about the eloquence displayed on the occasion for a month afterwards, with the usual pertinacity of Whigs applauding themselves, it is possible that we might have believed part, at least, of what we heard said, and almost, in spite of our creed, regretted our absence from a scene distinguished by the exertions of so many redoubtable orators. Erskine, Cockburn, Jeffrey, Murray, Grant, Moncrieff, Macfarlane, Craig, Steuart, and Inglis-these are, no doubt, grand names; and if you had been satisfied with oral commendations, we might have believed it possible that they had really uttered magnificent speeches; but you have quite undone yourselves by your "complete and permanent form," forsooth; and after perusing your no doubt at the least inpartial record, it is painful but necessary to inform you, that not one word seems to have been uttered, in the whole course of the evening, even by the most distinguished of these personages, which could do the smallest honour to the least of them. Although, for example, all the fine things in your pamphlet had been delivered by Mr William Inglis in the General Assembly, or the Grand Lodge, they would not have made ministers or masons consider him as one whit a less execrable rhetorician than before; and although all the wisdom you have treasured up, had dropt from the unassisted lips of Mr James Steuart, it would not have induced one person in the whole kingdom of Fife to vote for him-no, not with all the praises of the Examiner to boot. In fact, all your orators, widely different as they are in station and character, appear to have been, on this occasion, pretty much upon a par. The egregious vanity which may be pardoned in a Thomas Erskine, is matched with a most lamentable effect indeed by the vanity of speechifying writers and traders. Mr Cockburn seems to have been as harsh as Mr Moncrieff, Mr Jeffrey as frothy as Mr Grant, Mr Murray as

in the rank of powers, without intending to do so; for while he asserts that contrast is the subject matter of both, he also tells us, that the contrasts humour delights in are those exhibited by human character, and that those are the richest and the most extensive. Men of real wit have been more numerous in the world than men of real humour-just as men of fancy have been more numerous than men of imagination.

But leaving these hints to the reflection of our readers, let us accompany Mr Millar in his essay. Considering wit and humour as distinguished in the manner he has said, he remarks, that the latter has a much greater tendency than the former to excite violent and hearty laughter, and constitutes, for that reason, the chief province of comedy. "Human nature is a great laughing-stock, which we are pleased to see tossed about, and turned in all shapes, and with whose ridiculous appearance we are never tired." This, we think, is a very lively and clever sentence; but in what precedes it, Mr Millar has obviously been considering humour in its lowest and vulgar sense, and not at all in its poetical, moral, and philosophical sense. Still holding that the effect of humour is to excite excessive and outrageous laughter, Mr Millar observes, that though comic writing cannot be successfully cultivated until the liberal arts and sciences have, in general, made considerable progress, it is likely to attain its highest improvement at a period which precedes the most refined and correct state of taste and literature. Simple and ignorant people, he remarks, will laugh at a trifling or bad joke-while more refined persons are more fastidious and sparing of their merriment. This seems not to be very oracular, and is indeed a good instance of the formal gravity with which, when he supposes himself to be philosophizing, a very clever and acute man will ofttimes utter a most inane truism. But we suspect that there is no truth in this truism. A highly refined, that is to say, a highly cultivated, and vigorous state of society may not be given to laughter without a cause; but, nevertheless, they have many causes for laughter. And if humour be at all of the nature of that power which we have hinted at, it will be strongest

and most prevalent in that state of society where there are most humours. We suspect, that by "a refined and correct state of taste and literature," and also by the expression, "more refined persons," Mr Millar means that artificial and false taste whose strength lies in mere manners and conventional circumstances, and not genuine knowledge and power. We are convinced of this from what he says afterwards about " persons in the higher sphere of life," whose minds he supposes to be "filled with a greater store of ideas and sentiments" than those of other people, and whose conversation is said to be wittier and more diversified-in short, less low and humorous. Why, it is true that society may become so refined-that is to say, so polished that its strength is by attrition worn and attenuated, and doubtless humour will then be unknown. But society cannot be too enlightened to relish humour, and the finest specimens of humour have been produced during those periods when the mind of the nation, among whom they appeared, was in the fulness and perfec tion of its faculties.

We cannot therefore agree with this writer, in thinking that the higher advances of civilization, not only explode the ludicrous pastimes of a former age, but weaken the propensity to every species of exhibition. His argument in support of this assertion is singular. ly unfortunate. "To excite strong ridicule, the picture must be charged, and the features, though like, exagger ated. The man, who in conversation aims at the display of this talent, must endeavour to represent with peculiar heightening the tone, the aspect, the gesture, the deportment of the person he ridicules. To paint folly, he must for the time appear foolish." Here he confounds humorous or comic compositions-comedy itself-with the mere mimicry of individuals in conversation. And he also seems to think, that there can be no humorous mimicry, except of folly and absurdity. All this is quite away from the subject in hand. The entertainment arising from wit, he says, has no connexion with those humiliating circumstances which are inseparable from humour-and then he draws a very flourishing character of a person endowed with that quality, as vague as it is elaborate.

Notwithstanding the extreme con

and the lower orders think it incumbent upon them to imitate the gentry. Thus a great degree of uniformity of character and behaviour is propagated through all ranks, from the highest to the lowest; and a. French beggar is a gentleman in rags. Individuals, at this rate, have little temptation to laugh at each other; for this would be nearly the same thing as to laugh at themselves. From refinement of manners, at the same time, their attention has been directed to elegant sallies of pleasantry, more than to ludicrous and buffoonish representa tion; and the nation has at length come to occupy the superior regions of wit, without passing through the thicker and more vulgar medium of humour.

"It may, accordingly, be remarked, that among the numerous and distinguished men of genius whom France has produced, Le Sage, and Moliere, are perhaps the only examples that can be adduced of eminent humorous writers. The high and deserved reputation of the latter as a writer of comedy, is universally admitted; though I think it can hardly be denied, that his characters are commonly overcharged and far

cical.

"There is, perhaps, no country in which manufactures and commerce have been so far extended as in England, or consequently in which the inhabitants have displayed such a multiplicity and diversity of characters. What is called a humourist, that is, a person who exhibits particular whims and oddities, not for the sake of producing mirth, but to gratify his own inclination, is less known in any other country. The English are regarded by their neighbours as a nation of humourists; a set of originals, moulded into singular shapes, and as unlike the rest of

mankind as each other.

"Political reasoners have ascribed this wonderful diversity of character among the English to the form of their government, which imposes few restraints upon their conduct. It is obvious, however, that, though an absolute government may prevent any great singularity of behaviour, a free constitution will not alone produce it. Men do not acquire an odd or whimsical character, because they are at liberty to do so, but because they have propensities which lead them to it. In the republican states of antiquity, which enjoyed more political freedom, and among mere savages, who are almost under no government at all, nothing of this remarkable eccentricity is to be ob

served.

"But whatever be the cause of that endless diversity of characters which prevails in England, it certainly gives encouragement to sarcastic mirth and drollery; and has produced a general disposition to humour and

raillery, which is the more conspicuous from the natural modesty, reserve, and ta, citurnity of the people. To delineate the most unaccountable and strange appearances of human nature, they require not the aid of fiction; to conceive what is ridiculous, they have only to observe it. Each individual, according to the expression of a famous buffoon, is not only humourous in himself, but the cause of humour in other men. The national genius, as might be expected, has been moulded and directed by these peculiar circumstances, and has produced a greater number of eminent writers, in all the branches of comic and ludicrous composition, than are to be found in any other country. To pass over the extraordinary genius of Shakspeare in this as well as in other departments, with those other comic writers who lived about the commencement of English manufactures, and to mention only a few instances, near our own times; it will be difficult for any country, at one period, to match the severe and pointed irony of Swift; the lighter, but more laughable satire of Arbuthnot; the gentle raillery of Gay; the ludicrous and natural, though coarse, representations of low life, by Fielding; the strong delineations of character, together with the appropriate easy dialogue of Vanbrugh; the rich vein of correct pleasantry, in ridiculing the varieties of studied affectation, displayed by Congreve; and, above all, the universal, equable, and creative humour of Addison.

There is much excellent matter in this long extract, mixed up, (in our opinion at least) with much nonsense; yet it can be valuable only to those who know how to separate truth from error. The comedies of the Athenians he calls " mere farces !!" but the truth is evidently, that the professor never read a line of them but in some miserable translation. He despised classical learning, and therefore remained ignorant of its real spirit.Now, can he, consistently with his own theory, call the Athenians a wonderfully refined people in one sentence, and talk of their enjoyment of

mere farces" in the next? Had Mr Miller ever attended one of Professor Young's lectures on the Wit of Wits,' he would not have talked thus. But the extract contains many more debateable points, that we shall, on a future occasion, take up the discussion of some of the most interesting.