[Footnote A:  La Vie de Pierre Mignard, par L’Abbe de Monville, the work of an amateur.]

In the poem COWLET composed, on the death of his friend HARVEY, this stanza opens a pleasing scene of two young literary friends engaged in their midnight studies: 

  Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights! 
  How oft unwearied have we spent the nights,
  Till the Ledaean stars, so famed for love,
  Wonder’d at us from above. 
  We spent them not in toys, in lust, or wine;
    But search of deep philosophy,
    Wit, eloquence, and poetry;
  Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.

Touched by a personal knowledge of this union of genius and affection, even MALONE commemorates, with unusual warmth, the literary friendships of Sir Joshua Reynolds; and with a felicity of fancy, not often indulged, has raised an unforced parallel between the bland wisdom of Sir Joshua and the “mitis sapientia Laeli.”  “What the illustrious Scipio was to Laelius was the all-knowing and all-accomplished BURKE to REYNOLDS;” and what the elegant Laelius was to his master Panaetius, whom he gratefully protected, and to his companion the poet Lucilius, whom he patronised, was REYNOLDS to JOHNSON, of whom he was the scholar and friend, and to GOLDSMITH, whom he loved and aided[A].

[Footnote A:  Reynolds’s hospitality was unbounded to all literary men, and his evenings were devoted to their society.  It was at his house they compared notes; and the President of the Royal Academy obtained that information which gave him a full knowledge of the outward world, which his ceaseless occupation could not else have allowed.—­ED.]

Count AZARA mourns with equal tenderness and force over the memory of the artist and the writer Mengs.  “The most tender friendship would call forth tears in this sad duty of scattering flowers on his tomb; but the shade of my extinct friend warns me not to be satisfied with dropping flowers and tears—­they are useless; and I would rather accomplish his wishes, in making known the author and his works.”

I am infinitely delighted by a circumstance communicated to me by one who had visited GLEIM, the German poet, who seems to have been a creature made up altogether of sensibility.  His many and illustrious friends he had never forgotten, and to the last hour of a life, prolonged beyond his eightieth year, he possessed those interior feelings which can make even an old man an enthusiast.  There seemed for GLEIM to be no extinction in friendship when the friend was no more; and he had invented a singular mode of gratifying his feelings of literary friendships.  The visitor found the old man in a room of which the wainscot was panelled, as we still see among us in ancient houses.  In every panel GLEIM had inserted the portrait of a friend, and the apartment was crowded.  “You see,” said the grey-haired poet, “that I never have lost a friend, and am sitting always among them.”