dear sir, your most affectionate humble servant, DAVID HUME. Welde-Hall, near St Albans, April 25th, 1745. To Matthew Sharpe, Esq., of Hoddam. DEAR SIR, I have enclosed this letter under one to my friend Mr Blacklock, who has retired to Dumfries, and proposes to reside there for some time. His character and situation are, no doubt, known to you, and challenge the greatest regard from every one who has either good taste or sentiments of humanity. He has printed a collection of poems, which his friends are endeavouring to turn to the best account for him. Had he published them in the common way, their merit would have recommended them sufficiently to common sale; but, in that case, the greatest part of the profit, it is well known, would have redounded to the booksellers. His friends, therefore, take copies from him, and distribute them among their acquaintances. poems, if I have the smallest judgement, are, many of them, extremely beautiful, and all of them remarkable for correctness and propriety. Every man of taste, from the merit of the performance, would be inclined to purchase them; every benevolent man, from the situation of the author, would wish to encourage him; and as for those who have neither taste nor benevolence, they should be forced, by importunity, to do good against their will. I must, therefore, recommend it to you to send for a cargo of these poems, which the au The thor's great modesty will prevent him from offering to you, and to engage your acquaintance to purchase them. But, dear sir, I would fain go farther. I would fain presume upon our friendship (which now begins to be antient between us) and recommend to your civilities a man who does honour to his country by his talents, and disgraces it by the little encouragement he has hitherto met with. He is a man of very extensive knowledge and of singular good dispositions; and his poetical, though very much to be admired, is the least part of his merit. He is very well qualified to instruct youth by his acquaintance, both with the languages and sciences; and possesses so many arts of supplying the want of sight, that that imperfection would be no hinderance. Perhaps he may entertain some such project in Dumfries, and be assured you could not do your friends a more real service than by recommending them to him. Whatever scheme he may choose to em. brace I was desirous you should be prepossest in his favour, and be willing to lend him your countenance and protection, which, I am sensible, would be of great advantage to him. Since I saw you, I have not been idle. I have endeavoured to make some use of the library+ which was entrusted to me, and have employed myself in a composition of British history, beginning with the union of the two crowns. I have finished the reigns of James and Charles, and will soon send them to the press. I have the impudence to pretend that I am of no party, and have no byass. * The celebrated blind poet, whose amiable disposition and uncommon vivacity rendered him a general favourite. + The Advocates' Library, in which, for a time, Mr Hume held a situation. primitive simplicity of manners. Indeed, taking all that his different acquaintances have said of him together, he seems to be one of the most amiable characters that I ever met with. My lord, this uncommonly worthy and good man, cut off from all the usual methods of providing for himself by his blindness, (which, by the way, was the only thing that hindered him from being made Greek professor in the university of Aberdeen a year or two ago) is now in the 34th year of his age, with scarce 101. a year certain to maintain him; and one of his friends tells me, in a letter, that so moderate an income as 301. a year To Dr Conybeare, Bishop of Bristol, would make him quite easy and Bifleet, Jan. 11th, 1755. MY LORD,-Your lordship may possibly have heard of a strange phenomenon that appeared in the learned world last summer; a poet, who, though blind from his infancy, has got a knack of talking of colours and describing visible objects, and that sometimes much better than many others have done who have always enjoyed the use of their eyes. And yet this is one of the least valuable of his excellencies: all that know Mr Blacklock (for that is his name) speak of his many virtues in the highest strains, of the sweetness of his temper, his patience and contentedness under poverty, and all his other misfortunes; his industry in acquiring a great mastery in the Greek, Latin, and French languages, and a good share of knowledge in all the branches of erudition, except the mathematics; and his retaining, after all these acquisitions, the greatest modesty and humility, together with the strictest love of virtue, and a mere happy. Mr Dodsley, to whom a volume of his poems was sent from Edinburgh, (in which university some of his friends helped to maintain him for upwards of 12 years,) was so struck with the character, wants, and the me rits of the man, that he soon fell on the thought of proposing a subscription for his poems, in order to assist him towards purchasing an annuity for his life, at least near that very moderate income which would make him so happy; and on his communicating his design to me, I was so much moved too, that I promised to write a little account of the man and his poems, to make him somewhat more known in this part of our island. This account was published toward the beginning of November last; and Mr Dodsley's proposals (for a guinea, large paper, and half-aguinea the small) toward the close of the same month. I then went to town, where (after a fortnight's solicitation) I had the pleasure of paying in above 50 subscriptions the day before I came a way; and but three half-guinea ones in that number. But, at the same time, I had the mortification to find that my notable treatise had had very little effect. Like the honest Mr Abraham Adams, I had concluded that all good people only wanted to have a man of so much worth pointed out to them in such necessitous circumstances, and that they would all run to help him immediately; but I found myself as much mistaken as that gentleman generally was in his humane conclusions. For all the subscriptions that came in whilst I was in town seem to have been got by the mere dint of personal application: there is scarce the name of a single volunteer among them. As I found this to be the case, on my return home, I resolved to trouble each of my best friends with a letter, to beg their good word to any very worthy and charitable persons whom they might meet with, either in their visits or at their tables, for their help toward relieving so great and so uncommon a subject for charity. Will your lordship give me leave not to omit you in the number of those friends? and can you pardon me for this tedious narrative? I know your love of doing good, and hope that will plead for my execuse. I beg, leave to be ever, with the greatest regard, my lord, your lordship's most obedient and obliged humble servant, JOSEPH SPENCE, ON THE PRESENT STATE PERIODICAL CRITICISM. brook his presence: -Medio cum Phæbus in arce est, Aut Cœlum nox atra tenet, pavet ipse Sa cerdos Accessus, dominumque timet deprendere luci. Ir is not without some apprehensions the very devil himself, can hardly that, in prosecution of the plan laid down in our first volume, we approach the province of Periodical Criticism, impeded as our road must be with jungles, thorns, and thickets, and rendered dismal by the gibbetted reliques of unfortunate authors. The dark and mysterious forest of Massilia, in whose gloomy recesses human sacrifices were offered to invisible and malignant dæmons, impressed hardly more horror upon the veterans of Cæsar : -barbara ritu Sacra deûm, structæ diris altaribus aræ ; Our field of research, like the sacred grove of Lucan, is also subject to its fated periodical revolutions, its monthly or quarterly almutens, when the master of the sign, as astrologers said of old, sits in full power upon the cusp or entrance of the planetary house, as Lord of the Ascendant, and the bookseller, the printer, nay, Yet have we not entered rashly or unadvisedly upon our dread adventure, but have availed ourselves, like the knight errants of old, of such arms as might best secure us in an encounter with the magicians of the maze of Criticism, and in some respects bring the contest nearer to equality. Are these wizzards periodical in their exertions? We are annual.-Are they numerous and confederated? We also are plural.-Can they shroud themselves in obscurity by virtue of the helmet of the sable Orcus? We have the invisible cap of Jack the Giantkiller. Nor shall we lack the prayers of the oppressed to forward our chivalrous undertaking. Wherever, through the wide realms of literature, there is one who has writhed under the scourge of this invisible tribunal; wherever there is a gentle minstrel who bewails his broken harp, a fair maiden who weeps over her mangled novel, a politic knight who bemoans his travestied lucubrations, or a weary pilgrim who mourns his anathematized travels, we find a friend and a beadsman in the sufferer. Then with good courage, and St George to speed, we boldly press forward upon our purposed achievement. The early state of periodical criticism is of little consequence to our present purpose. At first the art pretended to afford little more than a list of the works of the learned in the order of publication, with some brief and dry account of the contents of each, a sort of catalogue raisonnée in short, where the books published within a certain period, were arranged according to order, with such a view of each as might inform the book-buyer whether it fell within the line of his reading or collecting. These earlier journalists contented themselves with intimating what the work under consideration actually contained, without pretending to point out its errors, far less to supply its omissions by their own disquisitions. As for satire and raillery, the laborious compilers of these dry catalogues, many of whom actually expired under the task they had undertaken, had neither leisure nor spirits for such flights of imagination. These were abandoned to the editors of newspapers and journals, whence flying shafts of satirical criticism were often discharged amid the thunder of political artillery. It was not from reviews, but from Mist's Journal, the Daily Journal, the Gazetteers, &c., that those vollies of abuse against Pope were hurled forth, which, contemptible as they now appear, had but too much eftect upon the poet's irritability. It is hard to guess what would have been the feelings of the Wasp of Twickenham, had he lived in the present day, when ten or twelve periodical works, devoted to criticism alone, claim as their proper subject, or rather their natural prey, every new publication which issues from the press. But the grave authors of the "Works of the Learned," and other early publications approaching to the nature of reviews, could not long preserve the neutrality to which at first they confined themselves. It was scarcely to be expected, that a critic of competent judgement should, in giving an account of a new work, resist the temptation to express the information or pleasure he had received from particular passages, still less that he could refrain from manifesting his own superiority, by pointing out occasional omissions or errors of his author. And thus reviews gradually acquired the form and character which they now exhibit, and which is too well known to require definition. But within the last ten years, a very important change has taken place in the mode of conducting them, a change which, as it has inexpressibly increased their importance and influence upon literature, claims for its causes a candid and critical attention. The discerning reader will easily perceive that we allude to the establishment of the Edinburgh Review; a journal which in its nature materially differs from its predecessors, and has given in many respects an entirely new turn to public taste and to critical discussion. It becomes our duty to state in what particulars the ancient system was innovated upon, and where the charm lies which has |