use the male as the common of the two,) he should take up his Strulbrugism, and be heard of no more.  Instances will be still more explanatory.  Voltaire ought to have pretended to die after Alzire, Mahomet, and Semiramis, and not have produced his wretched last pieces:  Lord Chatham should have closed his political career with his immortal war:  and how weak was Garrick, when he had quitted the stage, to limp after the tatters of fame by writing and reading pitiful poems; and even by sitting to read plays which he had acted with such fire and energy!  We have another example in Mr. Anstey; who, if he had a friend upon earth, would have been obliged to him for being knocked on the head, the moment he had published the first edition of the Bath Guide; for, even in the second, he had exhausted his whole stock of inspiration, and has never written any thing tolerable since.  When Such unequal authors print their works together, one man may apply in a new light the old hacked simile of Mezentius, who tied together the living and the dead.

We have just received the works of an author, from whom I find I am to receive much less entertainment than I expected, because I shall have much less to read than I intended.  His Memoirs, I am told, are almost wholly military; which, therefore, I shall not read:  and his poetry, I am sure, I shall not look at, because I should not understand it.  What I saw of it formerly, convinced me that he would not have been a poet, even if he had written in his own language:  and, though I do not understand German, I am told it is a fine language — and I can easily believe that any tongue (not excepting our old barbarous Saxon, which, a bit of an antiquary as I am, I abhor,) is more harmonious than French.  It was curious absurdity, therefore, to pitch on the most unpoetic language in Europe, the most barren, and the most clogged with difficulties.  I have heard Russian and Polish sung, and both sounded musical; but, to abandon one’s own tongue, and not adopt Italian, that is even sweeter, and softer, and more copious, than the Latin, was a want of taste that I should think could not be applauded even by a Frenchman born in Provence.  But what a language is the French, which measures verses by feet that never are to be pronounced; which is the case wherever the mute e is found!  What poverty of various sounds for rhyme, when, lest similar cadences should too often occur, their mechanic bards are obliged to marry masculine and feminine terminations as alternately as the black and white squares of a chessboard?  Nay, will you believe me, Madam,—­yes, you will, for you may convince your own eyes,-that a scene of Zaire begins with three of the most nasal adverbs that ever snorted together in a breath?  Enfin, donc, desormais, are the culprits in question.  Enfin donc, need I tell your ladyship, that the author I alluded to at the beginning of’ this long tirade is the late King of Prussia?