longer. He evidently has a soul, which can reflect no brightness in the full splendour of St. Peter's, and which can feel no melancholy in the fading glory of the Colis

Qum.

Tivoli, the ancient Tibur, was, probably,a deserted city in the time of Augustus, as it was built some hundred years even before the time of Romulus. Horace says,

-Mihi non jam regia Roma,
Sed vacuum Tibur placet.

Mr. S. speaks of Tivoli, as if its peculiarity consisted in its having once been a splendid city, and not in the classical remembrance of the sweet retirement of Horace, where he spent such merry times with Mecenas; nor in the splendour and magnificence of the villa's of Lucullus and Adrian. Horace thus speaks of it.

Tibur argoco positum colono,
Sit mece sedes utinam senecta.

On the modern Frescatti and the ancient Tusculum our traveller is wholly silent, though, on its hills was the "Superni villa candens Tusculi, of Horace, and there Cicero enjoyed his "Dies Tusculanos.”

We are now fast approaching the end of our journey, having to trace a distance only of one hundred and fifty miles to Naples. Here we have sometimes to move with a slow and solemn step, through the gloomy ranges of sepulchral monuments, overhung with the mists of the campagna, and sometimes to saunter listlessly along the mellow fields and through the ethereal expanse of the ager Felix.

Naples, as a city, has every thing to interest and please the traveller, whether his sight be confused with the moving column of men, which struggles through the Toledo, or whether, as he wanders

along the Chiaia, his eye reposes on the smooth and quiet surface of its bay, or is elevated by the dark and lofty promontory of Misenum, or brightened by the biazing summit of Vesuvius. If he be a traveller of pleasure, at Naples his whole senses may enjoy the fullest repletion. His eye may forever move through new tracts of delightful vision, in its environs; his ear may be filled with the softest sounds of Neapolitan musick; his odour will be in the fragrant breezes from the ager Felix; and his touch will be in the sweetest state of delectation in the universal contact of the softest and purest atmosphere.

If he be a scholar, in its neighbourhood he will find himself in the fairy land of classical poetry; and the ideal regions of ancient romance will now have the visible locality of the Baian coast. He will now ascend the mountain, where Eneas piously placed the bones of his companion Misenus,

after his battle with Triton.

"At pius Æneas ingenti mole sepulchram Imposuit, suaque arma viro, remumque, tubamque,

Monte fubæreo, qui nunc Misenum ab illo Dicitur, eternumque tenet per secula nomen." Virgil.

Having now seen performed the funeral rites of Misenus, he descends the promontory with Æneas, passes the temple of Apollo,* and, in order to consult the Cumaan sibyl, enters with him her resounding cavern.

"At pius Æneas arces, quibus altus Apollo Præsidet, horrendæque procul secreta sibyllæ, Antrumimmane petit."

lb.

We approached the crater, a hill of ashes and pummice stones, near enough to bear the great pot boil, producing a sound, that exactly resembled the boiling of a cauldron. P. 198. vol. ii.

"Jam pumices etiam nigrique et ambusti et fracti igne lapides inciderant. Interim e Vesuvio monte pluribus locis latissimæ flammæ altaque incendia relucebant, quorum fulgor et claritas tenebris noctis excitabatur. Jam dies alibi, illic nox omnibus noctibus nigrior densiorque." C. Plin. Tacito.

Having now marked out a few of the sins of omission, in our author, we shall expose to view a few of his sins of commission.

There is no kind of writing, which at first thought pleases more,

of travels; and, consequently, every man, who has travelled, thinks he has a right to become author. Most of the requisites of fine writing are, however, here necessary, from the simplest narration to the fulness and splendour of figurative description. The mind must here observe closely, and without prejudice, and we must relate with correctness and elegance. We must be correct concerning facts; and we ought to be elegant on that, which is already elegant. The book, which is now before us, is not only destitute of every such principle and rule, but exhibits to us the most ludicrous and striking carricature of the grace and dignity of a well-formed work. When the turgid answers for the sublime; modern sentimental conce it for natural and unaffected passion; and hard words for peculiar ideas, the Pennsylvanian will be thought a good writer. We subjoin a few examples of our author's style and manner to prove the impartiality of our remarks. For the clear and

perspicuous the following (so crowded with light).

An illuminated cross is suspended in the air, beneath the dome of St. Peter's ; when the symbolick refulgence creates sublime effects of light and shade, glittering upon the gilded ceiling, running into ob scurity in the recesses of the chapels, dying away in the dome, and fading by degrees on the sides of the nave in the weaker and weaker reflections of diagonal radiation. P. 269. v. ii,

Again.

A brilliant orange, melting into a peagreen of the most vivid transparency, was richly irradiated from behind a ridge of mountains upon the distant horizon, empurpled with the fairy tinge of an Italian atmosphere, P. 279. vol. ii.

We cannot refrain from extrac ting the following sinking, mock. heroick sentiment.

I saw the sun go down on the crumbling walls of the villa of Adrian—and, at 10 o'clock at night, as I sit in a large room, scantily hung with the scrawls of wandering travellers, I hear the roar of the Anio, and my windows rattle with a rising blast.--It reminds me, that I am alone--five thousand miles from my own fireside. The thought is serious-it stops my rambling pen. P. 248. vol. ii.

But our author does not stand charged merely with having violated the laws of writing; he is still more criminal by his forgery of words. This is a crime so atrocious, that we can receive no motion for the arrest of judgment, and no petition for the extension of pardon. If the following are not words of his own formation, they are indianisms, with which we are not acquainted; from their length we should take them for the

names of Indian roots. "Swamp ed;" "insurrectionary;" "importunacy;" "romantically;" &c. The laughable application of the following terms brings strongly to our mind the manner of a quack's

prescription. "Sinister ray ;" cubick cottages;" "transfixed waves ;" "spiral protuberances;" "monotony of silence;" "hillocks of the Appenines ;"" rainbow of a nave ;"" inimitable taste of

time."

ART. 5.

The life of Samuel Johnson, D. D. the first president of King's col lege, Newyork. Containing many interesting anecdotes; a general view of the state of religion and learning in Connecticut, during the former part of the last century; and an account of the institution and rise of Yale college, Connecticut; and of King's (now Co❤ lumbia) college, Newyork. By Thomas B. Chandler, D.D. formerly rector of St. John's church, Elizabethtown, N. J. To which is added, an appendix, containing many original letters to Dr. JohnNew York. Swords, 1805. 12mo. pp. 208.

son.

CALLIMACHUs, the learned li brarian of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, considered by all antiquity as the prince of elegiack poets, judged of a book from its size and the number of its pages according to the following rule,which he deemed infallible...that the larg er a book, the more nonsense it contained. The author of the work before us, penetrated no doubt with the most perfect con viction of the truth of the opinion of Callimachus, has taken a most commendable precaution, and by making his volume of a very moderate size, discovered great deference for the opinion of the publick. We think that Dr. Chandler deserves no common praise for making the life of Dr. Johnson to consist of only one hundred and fifty-five pages, and the appendix, containing letters to Dr. Johnson from bishop Berkeley, archbishop of fifty-three pages, in these bad Secker, bishop Lowth, and others, times, when the literary world seems to be threatened with being overwhelmed by the number and and size of the volumes which

continually issue from the press, called lives, memoirs, the correspondence, &c. &c. of men and women, boys and girls, philosophers and fools.

The object of modern biograph ers seems to be only to make of their heroes giants; stretching them out, to the very "crack of doom," over an insufferable number of pages. Such, in fact, has been the daring and extensive manufacture of books of this kind in England, and such the alarming and inordinate consumption of paper, that an ingenious mechanick, by the name of Neckinger, has lately erected a mill at Camberwell for the reproduction of this valuable article.

Dr. Samuel Johnson was born of respectable parents at Guilford, in Connecticut, the 14th October, 1696. His great-grand-father Robert, came from Kingston upon Hull, in Yorkshire, and was one of the first settlers of New-Haven, about the year 1637, and is said to have been of the same family with Johnson, the associate of Robert Brown, the father of the Brownists. Samuel Johnson, the subject of this memoir, early discovered an unconquerable desire for the acquisition of knowledge, and in his eleventh year was sent to the school at Guilford, to prepare him self for the college then at Saybrook, which he entered at four teen, and received a degree of bachelor of arts in 1714. In the succeeding year, much discontent was excited among the scholars at the college at Saybrook, in consequence of the ignorance and total incapacity of the governours to af ford them any useful instruction, and the scholars, in rapid succes sion, abandoned the college. Those, belonging to the towns on Connecticut river, associated under the di

rection of Messrs. Woodbridge and Buckingham, ministers of Hartford, who were trustees of the college, and who, desirous of obtaining a removal of the college from Saybrook to Weathersfield, in their own neighbourhood, in duced Messrs. Williams and Smith to establish a collegiate school at Weathersfield, to which the young gentlemen, above alluded to, im mediately resorted. Those, who belonged to the towns on the seashore, put themselves under the tuition of Mr. Johnson at Guilford. This academical schism called loudly for legislative interference, and accordingly,when the general court convened in October, 1716, an act was passed for establishing the college in New-Haven, and Mr. Johnson was unanimously chosen one of the tutors, where he resided but a short time. The disaffection of the scholars to their instructers at Saybrook, their consequent dispersion, the dissentions between the two parties at Weathersfield and New-Haven, which occasioned for some time much disturbance in the colony, and the final compromise, which ended in the peaceful establishment of the college at New-Haven, are minutely detailed by Dr. Chandler, and constitute an interesting part of the work before us.

We have thus seen, at Saybrook, the evils arising in consequence of placing boys under the direction of unskilful, inefficient instructers, the rebellion there excited, and the dissolution of the college. Even in our days we experience the mournful consequences of the insufficiency of the system of education adopted in the much boasted schools, colleges, and academies of N.England. Our school-masters, preceptors, and tutors, are too fre quently incompetent to discharge

their important duties, fraught with high responsibility. They are of ten men without manners, and without learning; who need "put no enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains ;" who, with Othello's drunken lieutenant, will say, this is my right hand, and this is my left. Deeply impressed with the importance of some immediate and radical change in our system of education, particularly as it respects the instructers of the Latin and Greek languages, at our academies and colleges, we cannot, on this subject, here omit inserting the declarations of Gilbert Wakefield, whose observations apply with ten fold more force to this country, than to England; most sincerely wishing, that the opinions of a man, so distinguish ed for science and classical learning, may have some effect upon our men of wealth and influence, and persuade them to offer such salaries to teachers of youth as shall induce men of understanding and learning, to undertake what at best must be an ungracious task.

"I cannot but lament that inundation of dreadful evils, which are let in upon society by the tribe of unprincipled, or ineffective school, masters. The majority of young men, who go to college after finishing their education at school, scarcely know, with tolerable accuracy, even the first rudiments of the languages.

"Can imagination represent to herself a more melancholy case, than that of an ingenuous, enterprising youth, wasting his time and blasting his hopes, in a seminary of one of those ignorant, heedless, insipid teachers, with which the kingdom is overrun ? I have kept my son,' said the mayor of one of the first towns in this kingdom, six or seven years with this

fellow K, learning Latin and Greek all this time; and, now he is come home, I find him unable to construe a prescription, or explain the inscriptions of the gallipots.' In my humble opinion this enormous usurpation of stupidity and impudence ought to be made a national concern.

"To suffer the rising generation to be thus abused beyond all recov ery from any future process, what is it but to blot the spring from the year? For my own part, I look upon the generality of these preceptors as robbers of hope and opportunity, those blessings for which no compensation can be made. I cherish liberty, I think, with a warmth of attachment inferiour to no man ; but I should rejoice to see, I confess, some restrictions in the case before us. Men of acknowledged qualifications should be appointed to examine, with a scrupulous and conscientious accuracy, the competency of all those who undertake the teaching of the learned languages; and none should be allowed to exercise this arduous office, but those who could endure the fiery trial. Society would be benefited beyond measure, and no real injury be done to the individual. Men should learn,or be taught, the knowledge of themselves; nor should he aspire to adorn the mind, who is fit only to trim a periwig; or, in the vain attempt of acquir. ing science, leave uncultivated the capabilities of a commendable shoe

maker.

All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies."

In March, 1720, Mr. Johnson was ordained as a congregational minister at West-Haven, in the twenty-fourth year of his age. From early life, even while at college, he had been opposed to extempore prayer. He had also an early dislike to the independent or