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sweet and tender blossoms of sensibility, which fall, and bleed, and die behind them. What an error is this, my dear S.......! I am frequently disposed to ask such men...." think you, that the stern and implacable Achilles, was an honester man, than the gentle, humane and considerate Hector? Was the arrogant and imperious Alexander, an honester man, than the meek, compassionate and amiable Cyrus? Was the proud, the rough, the surly Cato, more honest, than the soft, polite and delicate Scipio Africanus? In short, are not honesty and humanity compatible? And what is the most genuine and captivating polite. ness, but humanity refined ?"

But to return from this digression. The qualities by which Mr. ....... strikes the multitude, are his ingenuity and his wit. But those who look more closely into the anatomy of his mind, discover many properties of much higher dignity and importance. This gentleman, in my opinion, unites in himself a greater diversity of talents and acquirements, than any other at the bar of Virginia. He has the reputation, and I doubt not a just one, of possessing much legal science. He has an exquisite and a highly cultivated taste for polite literature; a genius quick and fertile; a style pure and classic; a stream of perspicuous and beautiful elocution; an ingenuity which no difficulties can entangle or embarrass; and a wit, whose vivid and brilliant corruscations, can guild and decorate the darkest subject. He chooses his ground in the first instance, with great judgment; and, when, in the progress of a cause, an unexpected evolution of testimony, or interme G

diate decisions from the bench, have beaten that ground from under him, he possesses a happy,. an astonishing versatility, by which he is enabled, at once, to take a new position, without appearing to have lost an atom, either in the measure or stability of his basis. This is a faculty, which, I have observed before, in an inferior degree; but Mr. ....... is so adroit, so superior in the execution of it, that, in him, it appears a new and peculiar talent. His statements, his narrations, his arguments, are all as transparent as the light of day. He reasons logically, and declaims very handsomely. It is true, he never brandishes the Olympic thunder of Homer; but then he seldom, if ever, sinks beneath the chaste and attractive majesty of Virgil. His fault is, that he has not veiled his ingenuity with sufficient address...... Hence, I am told, that he is considered as a Proteus; and the courts are disposed to doubt their senses, even when he appears in his proper shape. But in spite of this adverse and unpropitious dis-. trust, Mr...'s popularity is still in its flood, and he is justly considered as an honor and an ornament to his profession.

Adieu! my friend, for the present. E'er long we may take another tour through this gallery of portraits, if more interesting objects do not call us off. Again, my S......., good night.

LETTER IX.

Richmond, October $0.

TALENTS, my dear S......., wherever they have had a suitable theatre, have never failed to

emerge from obscurity, and assume their proper rank in the estimation of the world. The celebrated Camden, is said to have been the tenant of a garret. Yet from the darkness, poverty and ignominy, of this residence, he advanced to distinction and wealth, and graced the first offices and titles of our island. It is impossible to turn over the British Biography, without being struck and charmed by the multitude of correspondent examples; a venerable groupe of novi homines, as the Romans called them; men, who, from the lowest depths of obscurity and want, and without even the influence of a patron, have risen to the first honors of their country, and founded their own families anew. In every nation, and in every age, great talents, thrown fairly into the point of public observation, will, invariably, produce the same ultimate effect. The jealous pride

of power may attempt to repress and crush them; the base and malignant rancour of impotent spleen and envy may strive to embarrass and retard their flight but these efforts, so far from atchieving their ignoble purpose, so far from producing a discernable obliquity in the ascent of genuine and vigorous talents, will serve only to increase their momentum and mark their transit with an additional stream of glory.. When the great earl of Chatham first made his appearance in our House of Commons, and began to astonish and transport the British Parliament, and the British nation, by the boldness, the force and range of his thoughts, and the celestial fire and pathos of his eloquence, it is well known, that the minister, Walpole, and his brother Horace, (from motives 143362

very easily understood) exerted all their wit, all their oratory, all their acquirements of every description, sustained and enforced by the unfeeling "insolence of office," to heave a mountain on his gigantic genius, and hide it from the world...... Poor and powerless attempt!....The tables were turned. He rose upon them in the might and irresistible energy of his genius, and in spite of all. their convolutions, frantic agonies and spasms, he strangled them and their whole faction, with as much ease, as Hercules did, the serpent, Python. Who can turn over the debates of the day, and read the account of this conflict between youthful ardor and hoary headed cunning and power, without kindling in thre cause of the tyro, and shouting at his victory? That they should have attempted to pass off the grand, yet solid and judicious operations of a mind like his, as being mere theatrical start and emotion; the gid dy, hair-brained eccentricities of a romantic boy! That they should have had the presumption to suppose themselves capable of chaining down to the floor of the parliament, a genius so etherial, towering, and sublime! Why did they not, in the next breath, by way of crowning the climax of vanity, bid the magnificent fire-ball to descend from its exalted and appropriate region, and perform its splendid tour along the surface of the earth? When the son of this great man, toc,

*See a beautiful note in Darwin's Botanic Garden, in which the writer suggests the probability of three concentric strata of our atmosphere, which, or between them, are produced four

our present minister, and his compeer and rival, our friend, first commenced their political career, the public papers teemed with strictures on their respective talents; the first was censured as being merely a dry and even a flimsy reasoner; the last was stigmatized as an empty declaimer. But error and misrepresentation soon expire, and are forgotten while truth rises upon their ruins, and "flourishes in eternal youth." Thus, the false, the light, fugacious newspaper criticisms, which attempted to dissect and censure the arrangement of those gentlemen's talents, have been long since swept away by the besom of oblivion. They wanted truth, that soul, which, alone, can secure immortality to any literary work. And Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, have, for many years, been, reciprocally and alternately recognized, just as their subject demands it, either as close and cogent rea

kinds of meteors; in the lowest, the common lightning; in the next shooting stars: and the highest region, which he supposes to consist of inflammable gas, tenfold lighter than the common atmospheric air, he makes the theatre of the northern light, and fire-ball or draco volans. He recites the history of one of the latter, seen in the year 1758, which was estimated to have been a mile and a half in circumference; to have been 100 miles high; and to have moved towards the north, 30 miles in a second. It had a real tail many miles long, which threw off sparks in its course, and the whole exploded with a sound, like that of distant thunder. Bot. Garden. Part 1. add note 1.

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