I now lead, and the life I foresee I shall lead.  I am angry, and envious, and dejected, and frantic, and disregard all present things, as becomes a madman to do.  I am infinitely pleased (though it is a gloomy joy) with the application of Dr. Swift’s complaint, that he is forced to die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”  Let the lover of solitude muse on its picture throughout the year, in the following stanza by the same poet:—­

    Tedious again to curse the drizzling day,
      Again to trace the wintry tracks of snow! 
    Or, soothed by vernal airs, again survey
      The self-same hawthorns bud, and cowslips blow!

Swift’s letters paint in terrifying colours a picture of solitude, and at length his despair closed with idiotism.  The amiable Gresset could not sport with the brilliant wings of his butterfly muse, without dropping some querulous expression on the solitude of genius.  In his “Epistle to his Muse,” he exquisitely paints the situation of men of genius: 

    ——­Je les vois, victimes du genie,
    Au foible prix d’un eclat passager,
    Vivre isoles, sans jouir de la vie!

And afterwards he adds,

    Vingt ans d’ennuis, pour quelques jours de gloire!

I conclude with one more anecdote on solitude, which may amuse.  When Menage, attacked by some, and abandoned by others, was seized by a fit of the spleen, he retreated into the country, and gave up his famous Mercuriales; those Wednesdays when the literati assembled at his house, to praise up or cry down one another, as is usual with the literary populace.  Menage expected to find that tranquillity in the country which he had frequently described in his verses; but as he was only a poetical plagiarist, it is not strange that our pastoral writer was greatly disappointed.  Some country rogues having killed his pigeons, they gave him more vexation than his critics.  He hastened his return to Paris.  “It is better,” he observed, “since we are born to suffer, to feel only reasonable sorrows.”

LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS.

The memorable friendship of Beaumont and Fletcher so closely united their labours, that we cannot discover the productions of either; and biographers cannot, without difficulty, compose the memoirs of the one, without running into the life of the other.  They pourtrayed the same characters, while they mingled sentiment with sentiment; and their days were as closely interwoven as their verses.  Metastasio and Farinelli were born about the same time, and early acquainted.  They called one another Gemello, or The Twin, both the delight of Europe, both lived to an advanced age, and died nearly at the same time.  Their fortune bore, too, a resemblance; for they were both pensioned, but lived and died separated in the distant courts of Vienna and Madrid.  Montaigne and Charron were rivals, but always friends; such was Montaigne’s