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and a messenger was dispatched for a surgeon. In the meantime, the captain perceived himself to be dying and whatever might before have been his opinion of right or wrong, and honour and shame, he now thought all dissimulation criminal, and that his murderer had a right to that truth which he thought it meritorious to deny him when he was his friend: he, therefore, earnestly desired to speak a few words to him in private. This request was immediately granted; the persons who had rushed in withdrew, contenting themselves to keep guard at the door; and the captain, beckoning Sir James to kneel down by him, then told him, that " however his lady might have been surprised or betrayed by pride or fear into dissimulation or falsehood, she was innocent of the crime which he supposed her solicitous to conceal :" he then briefly related all the events as they had happened; and at last, grasping his hand, urged him to escape from the window, that he might be a friend to his widow and to his child, if its birth should not be prevented by the death of its father. Sir James yielded to the force of this motive, and escaped as the captain had directed. In his way to Dover he read the letter which he had taken from the chairman, and the next post enclosed it in the following to his lady:

"MY DEAR CHARLOTTE,

"I AM the most wretched of all men; but I do not. upbraid you as the cause: would to God that I were not more guilty than you! We are the martyrs of dissimulation. By dissimulation dear Captain Freeman was induced to waste those hours with you, which he would otherwise have enjoyed with the poor unhappy dissembler his wife. Trusting in the success of dissimulation, you were tempted to venture into the Park, where you met him whom

you wished to shun. By detecting dissimulation in the captain, my suspicions were increased; and by dissimulation and falsehood you confirmed them. But your dissimulation and falsehood were the effects of mine; yours were ineffectual, mine succeeded: for I left word that I was gone no farther than the coffee-house, that you might not suspect I had learned too much to be deceived. By the success of a lie put into the mouth of a chairman, I was prevented from reading a letter which at last would have undeceived me; and by persisting in dissimulation, the captain has made his friend a fugitive, and his wife a widow. Thus does insincerity terminate in misery and confusion, whether in its immediate purpose it succeeds or is disappointed. my dear Charlotte! if ever we meet again,

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to meet again in peace is impossible--but if ever we meet again, let us resolve to be sincere: to be sincere is to be wise, innocent, and safe. We venture to commit faults which shame or fear would prevent, if we did not hope to conceal them by a lie. But in the labyrinth of falsehood, men meet those evils which they seek to avoid; and as in the straight path of truth alone they can see before them, in the straight path of truth alone they can pursue felicity with success. Adieu! I am▬▬ dreadful!I can subscribe nothing that does not reproach and torment me-Adieu !"

Within a few weeks after the receipt of this letter, the unhappy lady heard that her husband was cast away in his passage to France.

VOL. II.

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LONGINUS proceeds to address his friend Terentianus in the following manner:

"It is the peculiar privilege of poetry, not only to place material objects in the most amiable attitudes, and to clothe them in the most graceful dress, but also to give life and motion to immaterial beings; and form, and colour, and action, even to abstract ideas; to embody the virtues, the vices, and the passions; and to bring before our eyes, as on a stage, every faculty of the human mind.

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Prosopopoeia, therefore, or personification, conducted with dignity and propriety, may be justly esteemed one of the greatest efforts of the creative power of a warm and lively imagination. Of this figure many illustrious examples may be produced from the Jewish writers I have been so earnestly recommending to your perusal; among whom, every part and object of nature is animated and endowed with sense, with passion, and with language.

"To say that the lightning obeyed the commands of God would of itself be sufficiently sublime; but a Hebrew bard expresses this idea with far greater energy and life; Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?' And again, God sendeth forth light, and it goeth: he calleth it again, and it obeyeth him with fear.' How animated, how emphatical is this unexpected answer, 'Here we are!'

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Plato, with a divine boldness, introduces in his Crito, the laws of Athens pleading with Socrates, and dissuading him from an attempt to escape from the prison in which he was confined; and the Roman rival of Demosthenes had made his country tenderly expostulate with Catiline, on the dreadful miseries which his rebellion would devolve on her head. But will a candid critic prefer either of these admired personifications to those passages in-the Jewish poets, where Babylon, or Jerusalem, or Tyre, are represented as sitting on the dust, covered with sackcloth, stretching out her hands in vain, and loudly lamenting their desolation? Nay, farther, will he reckon them even equal to the following fictions? Wisdom is introduced, saying of herself: When God prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a circle upon the face of the deep, when he gave to the sea his decree that the waters should not pass his commandments, when he appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by him as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, playing always before him.' Where, Terentianus, shall we find our Minerva speaking with such dignity and elevation? The goddess of the Hebrew bard is not only the patroness and inventress of arts and learning, the parent of felicity and fame, the guardian and conductress of human life; but she is painted as immortal and eternal, the constant companion of the great Creator himself, and the partaker of his counsels and designs. Still bolder is the other prosopopœia: Destruction and death say (of Wisdom), we have heard the fame thereof with our ears.' If pretenders to taste and judgment censure such a fiction as extravagant and wild, I despise their frigidity and gross insensibility.

"When Jehovah is represented as descending to

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punish the earth in his just anger, it is added, Before him went the pestilence. When the Babylonian tyrant is destroyed, the fir trees rejoice at his fall, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us.' And at the captivity of Jerusalem the very ramparts and the walls lament, they languish together.' Read likewise the following address, and tell me what emotion you feel at the time of perusal: ‘0 thou sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? Put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest and be silent.' Art thou not amazed and delighted, my friend, to behold joy, and anguish, and revenge ascribed to the trees of the forest, to walls, and warlike instruments?

"Before I conclude these observations, I cannot forbear taking notice of two remarkable passages in the Hebrew writers, because they bear a close resemblance with two in our own tragedians.

"Sophocles, by a noble prosopopoeia, thus aggravates the misery of the Thebans, visited by a dreadful plague Hell is enriched with groans and lamentations.' This image is heightened by a Jewish author, who describes Hell, or Hades, as an enormous monster, who hath extended and enlarged himself, and opened his insatiable mouth without measure.'

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"Cassandra, in Æschylus, struck with the treachery and barbarity of Clytemnestra, who is murdering her husband Agamemnon, suddenly exclaims in a prophetic fury, Shall I call her the direful mother of Hell? To represent the most terrible species of destruction, the Jewish poet says, the firstborn of Death shall devour his strength.'

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"Besides the attribution of person and action to objects immaterial or inanimate, there is still another species of the prosopopeia no less lively and

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