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what joy in their pleasures did I attend the first and the succeeding broods through the full period of their joyful lives! with what enthusi astic transport did I address to each of these yet happy animals, the jovial Anacreon's con gratulation to the Cicada:

Blissful insect! what can be,
In happiness, compared to thee?
Fed with nourishment divine,
The dewy morning's sweetest wine.
Nature waits upon thee still,
And thy fragrant cup does fill.
All the fields that thou dost see,
All the plants belong to thee;
All that summer hours produce,
Fertile made with ripening juice.
Man for thee does sow and plow,
Farmer he, and landlord thou.
Thee the hinds with gladness hear
Prophet of the ripen'd year!
To thee alone, of all the earth,
Life is no longer than thy mirth.

Happy creature! happy thou

Dost neither age nor winter know;

But when thou'st drank, and danc'd, and sung

Thy fill, the flowery leaves among,

Sated with the glorious feast,

Thou retir'st to endless rest.

While the contemplative mind thus almost envies what the rude observer would treat with

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an unfeeling contempt, how natural is it to a disinterested heart, employed in surveying the unbounded works of its Creator, to shrink into itself on the thought, that there may be, in the immense chain of beings, many, though as invisible to us as we to the inhabitants of this little flower, whose organs are not made for comprehending objects larger than a mite, or more distant than a straw's breadth, to whom we may appear as much below regard, as these

to us.

With what derision should we treat those little reasoners, could we hear them arguing for the unlimited duration of the scene destined for the extent of their knowledge, as well as their action! and how does the infidel dare to suppose, on no better a foundation, that the earth which we inhabit is eternal!

INSPECTOR, No. 109.

This paper is written with uncommon elegance and beauty of style, and exhibits the descriptive powers of Sir John Hill to great advantage.

No. LXXXV.

Saltem daretur in sacris literis tranquillè conse

nescere,

ERASMI EPIST.

May the evening of my life pass in tranquillity,
and in the study of the sacred Scriptures.
PURSUITS OF LITERATURE.

A GENTLEMAN, a man of genius and discern ment, whose ill health had compelled me to banish him into the country, and whose disrelish for the joys of the bottle, or the pleasures of the chase, naturally condemned him to many hours of solitude in his retirement, wrote me word, some weeks since, that he had read through the books I had recommended it to him to take down, and desired me to tell him what the world afforded new. I was sure his understanding would countenance what I had to propose to him. I recommended, instead of new books, the oldest in the world; I advised him to the Bible; and rested my future credit with him upon it, that if he would give it as fair a reading as he had done the trifles which had of late engaged his attention, he would confess it was the only book in the world that deserved it.

I have received many letters from him since, and not one of them without confirmations of the assent which his first brought to my opinion; not one without encomiums on the particular part in which he was at that time engaged, amounting to almost an enthusiastic rapture.

I could wish that a real instance of this kind might recommend the same road to pleasure to a multitude of people, as little acquainted as he was, with a book whose name is familiar to every body. There never was an age in which reading was a more universal employment than this; and I am sorry to add, there never was one, in which the works usually read so little deserved it. The unlucky disposition to things that are new is not peculiar to my corre spondent; every body falls too much into it; and to such a height is the custom growing, that a man is hardly qualified for conversation, who is not as well acquainted with the characters of the last romance, as with the names of the heroes and heroines on the stage of life. Novelty, I own, is a very interesting plea to us; but, surely, it is not the period of time elapsed, but the acquaintance we have formed with the work, that makes it new or old to our acquaintance. Things which we have never heard before are new to us, though transacted in the

most distant æra; and books, which we have not read, must be equally possessed of that charm, though co-eval with the creation.

A chapter in the Bible, it is too certain, will be, to the generality of modern readers, as much a novelty as one in Tom Jones could be, when new-fallen from the almost-creative pen of its author; and I have so good an opinion, or, to use a juster phrase, so much knowledge of the present taste of the polite world, that, in spite of all their flights and wildnesses, I am persuaded a man who could give a good account of the one, would be at least as well received by the company, as he who could exert himself in comments on the other.

There is, indeed, no work in which we meet with so much to delight and to improve, to ravish and to instruct us; no work in which lessons of morality are delivered with so pleasing a familiarity, or so compulsive an authority. Strange combination! but inviolably preserved! None, in which facts so great or so interesting are related, nor any other that has language equal to the subjects.

If Longinus knew any thing of the sublime in writing, the Scriptures must be full of it, since his whole work, compared with their several parts, seems but a comment on their beauties;

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