we should clash. W. I believe it is not known what my work is, very few persons have seen it. H. Why, it is a critical his tory of painting, is not it? W. No, it is an antiquarian history of it, in England; I bought Mr. Virtue's MMS. and I believe the work will not give much offence; besides, if it does, I cannot help it: when I publish any thing, I give it to the world to think of it as they please. H. Oh! if it is an antiquarian work, we shall not clash; mine is a critical work; I don't know whether I shall ever publish it. It is rather an apology for painters. I think it is owing to the good sense of the English, that they have not painted better. W. My dear Mr. Hogarth, I must take my leave of you, you now grow too wild-and I left him. If I had staid, there remained nothing but for him to bite me. I give you my honour this conversa tion is literal, and, perhaps, as long as you have known Englishmen and painters, you never met any thing so distracted. I had consecrated a line to his genius (I mean for wit) in my preface; I shall not erase it; but I hope nobody will ask me if he is not mad." We cannot, after having given two Numbers to this work, devote our page to the private details of the accession and marriage of our now venerable king. They are interesting, and excite strong emotions, when we contrast the joy and festivity of that hour with the affecting situation of the present. In novelty, however, they must yield to the accounts of the death and funeral of George the 24, and of the visit of the king of Denmark to their present majesties, in 1768. We select the latter for extract.

"I came to town to see the Danish king. He is as diminutive as if he came out of a kernel in the Fairy Tales. He is not ill made, nor weakly made, though so small; and though his face is pale and delicate, it is not at all ugly, yet has a strong cast of the date king, and enough of the late prince of

to put one upon one's guard not to be prejudiced in kis favour. Still he has more royalty than folly in his air; and, considering he is not twenty, is as well as one expects any king in a puppet-show to be.

He only takes the title of Altesse, an absurd mezzo-termine, but acts king exceedingly; struts in the circle like a cocksparrow, and does the honours of himself very civilly."

Of George II. whom the author never spares, we are told that he

Is dead richer than sir Robert Brown, though perhaps not so rich as lord Hardwicke. He has left 50,0001. between the duke, Emily, and Mary; the duke has given up, his share. To lady Yarmouth, a cabinet, with the contents; they call it 11,000l. By a German deed, he gives the duke to the value of 180,000l. placed on a mortgage, not immediately recoverable, He had once given him twice as much more, then revoked it, and at last excused the revocation on the pretence of the expenses of the war;

but owns he was the best son that ever lived, and had never offended him; a pretty strong comment on the affair of Closterseven! He gives him besides, all his jewels in England; but had removed all the best to Hanover, which he makes crown jewels, and his successor residuary legatee."

"Do you know I had the curiosity to go to the burying t'other night? I had never seen a royal funeral:"

After describing the state, procession to Westminster Abbey, &c.

"The real serious part was the figure of the duke of Cumberland, heightened by a thousand melancholy circumstances, He had a dark brown Adonis, and a cloak of black cloth, with a train of five yards. Attending the funeral of a father could not be pleasant: his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it nearly two hours; his face bloated and distorted with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, one of his eyes, and placed over the mouth of the vault, into which, in all probability, he must himself so soon descend. Think how unpleasant a situation! He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque duke of N- (Newcastle.) He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass, to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand, and mopping his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the duke of Cumberland, who was sink. ing with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round, found it was the duke of N- standing upon his train, to avoid the chill of the marble."

There are several notices of the com mencing reign of George Ifl. two of which, as they are short, and from a personal observer, we will here annex.

"The young king has all the appearance of being amiable. There is great grace to temper much dignity, and extreme goodnature, which breaks out on all occasions." p. 218.

"For the king himself, he seems all goodnature, and wishing to satisfy every body; all his speeches are obliging. I saw him again yesterday (12 Nov. 1760,) and was surprised to find the levee-room had lost so entirely the air of the lion's den. This sovereign don't stand on one spot, with his eyes fixed royally on the ground, and dropping bits of German news; he walks about and speaks to every body. I saw him afterwards on the throne, where he is graceful and genteel, sits with dignity, and reads his answers to addresses well." p. 222.

Before descending from these royal memoranda, we shat quote one passage more respecting a queen of former days:

I must tell you an anecdote that I found

t'other day in an old French author, which is a great drawback on beaux sentiments and romantic ideas. Pasquier, in his Recherches de la France, is giving an account of the queen of Scots execution; he says, the night before, knowing her body must be stripped for her shroud, she would have her feet washed, because she used ointment to one of them, which was sore. I believe I have told you, that in a very old trial of her, which I bought from lord Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take sentiments out of their pantouffles, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is!"

On looking over our extracts, we are admonished that so many grave ones would afford an ill specimen of the work before us, and reserving a few selections for a concluding Number, we shall close the present with some lighter examples.

"I have by me a love-letter written during my father's administration, by a jour neyman tailor to my brother's second chambermaid; his offers were honourable; he proposed matrimony, and to better his terms, informed her of his pretensions to a place: they were founded on what he called, some services to the government. As the nymph could not read, she carried the epistle to the house-keeper to be deciphered, by which means it came into my hands. I inquired what where the merits of Mr. Vice Crispin; was informed that he had made a suit of clothes for a figure of lord Marr, that was burned after the rebellion!"

"Did I tell you that I had found a text in Deuteronomy to authorise my future battlements? (at Strawberry Hill.) When thou buildest a new house, then shalt thou make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thy house, if any man fall from thence." 1749.

"Loo is mounted to its zenith; the parties last till one and two in the morning. We played at lady H- -d's last week, the last night of her lying-in, till deep into Sunday morning. It is now adjourn

ed to Mrs. F -y's, whose child the town calls Pam-ela. The invasion is not half so much in fashion as loo, and the king demanding the assistance of the militia does not add much dignity to it. The great Pam of parliament, who made the notion, entered into a wonderful definition of the several sorts of fear; from fear, that comes from pusillanimity, up to fear from magnanimity. It put me in mind of that wise Pythian, my lady L who, when her sister, lady D- was dying, pronounced, that if it were a fever from a fever, she would live; but if it were a fever from death, she would die."

Having already devoted three Numbers to this entertaining quarto, we are compell. ed, for variety's sake alone, to bid our adieu to it in the present publication. The narra

tive of the fate of lord Ferrers is very interestingly given in several letters. The first is of the 28th of January, 1760:

"You have heard, I suppose, a horrid story of another kind, of lord Ferrers' murdering his steward in the most barbarous and deli berate manner. He sent away all his servants but one, and, like that heroic mur. deress, queen Christina, carried the poor man through a gallery and several rooms, locking them after him, and then bid the man kneel down, for he was determined to kill him. The poor creature flung himself at his feet, but in vain,-was shot, and lived twelve hours. Mad as this action was from the consequences, there was no frenzy in his behaviour; he got drunk, and at inter vals talked of it coolly; but did not attempt to escape till the colliers beset his house, and were determined to take him alive or dead. He is now in the jail at Leicester, and will soon be removed to the Tower, then to Westminster Hall, and I suppose to TowerHill-"

On the 19th April, the trial, which lasted three days, is thus described:

"At first I thought lord Ferrers shocked, but in general he behaved rationally and coolly; though it was a strange contradiction to see a man trying, by his own sense, to prove himself out of his senses. It was more shocking to see his two brothers brought to prove the lunacy in their own blood, in order to save their brother's life. Both are almost as ill-looking men as the earl; one of them is a clergyman, suspended by the bishop of London for being a methodist; the other a wild vagabond, whom they call in the country, ragged and dangerous. After lord Ferrers was condemned, he made an excuse for pleading madness, to which he said he was forced by his family. He is respited till Monday fortnight, and will then be hanged, I believe in the Tower; and to the mortification of the peerage, is to be anatomized, conformably to the late act for murder. Many peers were absent; lord Foley and lord Jersey attended only on the first day; and lord Huntingdon, and my nephew Orford, (in compliment to his mother,) as related to, the prisoner, withdrew without voting. But never was a criminal more literally tried by his peers, for the three persons who interested themselves most in the examination, were at least as mad as he; lord Ravensworth, lord Talbot, and lord Fortescue.

"May 6th. The extraordinary history of lord Ferrers is closed: he was executed yesterday. Madness, that in other countries is a disorder, is here a systematic character: it does not hinder people from forming a plan of conduct, and from even dying agreeably to it. You remember how the last Ratcliffe died with the utmost propriety; so did this horrid lunatic coolly and sensibly. His own and his wife's relations had asserted that he would tremble at last. No such thing, he shamed heroes. He bore the so

lemnity of; a pompous and tedious procession of above two hours, from the Tower to Tyburn, with as much tranquillity as if he was only going to his own burial, not to his own execution. He even talked on indifferent subjects in the passage; and if the sheriffs and the chaplains had not thought that they had parts to act too, and had not consequently engaged him in most particular conversation, he did not seem to think it necessary to talk on the occasion: he went in his wedding-clothes, marking the only remaining impression on his mind. The ceremony he was in a hurry to have over: he was stopped at the gallows by the vast crowd, but got out of his coach as soon as he could, and was but seven minutes on the scaffold, which was hung with black, and prepared by the undertaker of his family at their expense. There was a new contrivance for sinking the stage under him, which did not play well; and he suffered a little by the delay, but was dead in four minates. The mob was decent, and admired him, and almost pitied him. - - - - - With all his madness he was not mad enough to be struck with his aunt Huntingdon's sermons. The methodists have nothing to brag of his conversion, though Whitfield prayed for him, and preached about him."

There are points, both in the circumstances of this extraordinary case, and the reflections to which it leads, which seem pe culiarly applicable to recent murders and suicides. Is it really true that in Britain, madness is a system rather than a disease? We have not room for a curious account of a visit to the Cock-lane ghost, in which Mr. Walpole accompanied the duke of York and several noble ladies as well as lords. Our author had sense enough to laugh at this imposture.

But the portions of this work which strike us as particularly worthy of attention, are those which contain the remarks of this acute and worldly-versed observer on the first indications of that state of society in France, and of that new philosophy, which have been consummated under our eyes in blood and horror.

Mr. Walpole visited France in 1765, and in several letters he thus speaks of what he saw and noticed at that period:

." Instead of laughing (at Harlequin) I sit silently reflecting how every thing loses charms when one's own youth does not lend it gilding! When we are divested of that eagerness and illusion, with which our youth presents objects to us, we are but the capul mortuum of pleasure.

"Grave as these ideas are, they do not unfit me for French company. The present tone is serious enough in conscience. Unluckily the subjects of their conversation are duller to me than my own thoughts, which may be tinged with melancholy reflections, but I doubt from my constitution will never be insipid. The French affect philosophy, literature, and free-thinking: the first

never did, and never will possess me: of the two others I have long been tired. Freethinking is for one's self, surely not for society; besides, one has settled one's way of thinking, or knows it cannot be settled, and for others, I do not see why there is not as much bigotry in attempting conversions from any religion as to it. I dined to-day with a dozen scavants, and though all the servants were waiting, the conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would suffer, at my own table in England, if a single footman were present."

And right too, for these servants in France afterwards rewarded their masters, for the corruption of their principles, by cutting their throats, and dragging them to the scaffold. But we continue our extracts.

"Jesuits, methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rosseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, the Humes, the Lyttletons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, all are to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest are their objects; and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his almanac, and believes the stars but so many farthing candles, created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, a wiser and more rational being, and I am sure an honester, than any of them. Oh! I am sick of visions and systems, that shove one another aside, and come over again, like the figures in a moving picture."

The following amusing anecdote is related in the next letter. It is in French, but will bear an English translation:

"The Canton of Berne ordered all the impressions of Helvetius's SPIRIT' (Esprit) and Voltaire's VIRGIN' (Pucelle) to be seized. The officer of justice, employed by them, came into the council and said, Great lords, after every possible research, we can find, in the whole city, only a very few of Spirit, and not one Virgin!"

Having fallen again into the lighter reading, we proceed to copy some lines by Mr. Walpole, on lady Mary Coke having St. Anthony's fire in her cheek:

No rouge you wear, nor can a dart From Love's bright quiver wound your heart. And thought you Cupid and his Mother Would unreveng'd their anger smother? No, no, from heaven they sent the fire That boasts St. Anthony its sire; They pour'd it on one peccant part, Inflam'd your check, if not your heart. In vain for see the crimson rise,j And dart fresh lustre thro' your eyes; While ruddier drops and baffled pain Enhance the white they meant to stain. Ah! nymph, on that unfading face, With fruitless pencil, Time shall trace His lines malignant, since disease But gives you mightier power to please."

"I will conclude my letter with a most charming trait of Madame de Mailly, which

Respecting what has passed in former times, I can give no testimony, though every thing shows that many circumstances have been exaggerated, and represented in incredibly odious colours. I speak only of a later period of twelve years, and I have great satisfaction in saying, that in my long and repeated visits to the Mexican mines and smelting-houses, I never found a slave in them; and that many owners of mines do not even punish the almost daily embezzlement of rich gold and silver ore, but content themselves with taking back what is stolen, and letting the culprits go, though, when they are caught in the fact, it is allowed to confine them, but by no means to inflict on them corporal punishment.

I even knew an instance in which a Spanish officer of justice, in the actual exercise of his functions, was pelted with stones by some rioters of the lower class of different casts: having obtained assistance, he caused corporal punishment to be inflicted on some of the ringleaders who were taken in the fact: for this he was not only deprived of his office, but sentenced to pay a considerable fine, because he was not authorised to act as he had done without the previous approbation of the royal government of the country (Real Audiencia;) and this respectable tribunal never authorises corporal punishment till the affair is inquired into, proved, and found to be a case calling for such remedy.

I shall be happy if these few remarks should contribute to make people judge of nations, their character and relations, more favourably than has sometimes been the case; and intend, at a future time, to communicate farther observations on that country, which deserves, on many accounts, to be called the New World.

TIFLIS.

SONNESCHMID.

From the journal of a German traveller who has recently visited Tiflis, we extract the following observations on that city, and the part of Russia in which it is situated:

"Our caravan spent eight days in proceeding from Mosdak to Tiflis, a distance of about 250 wersts; but if due attention were paid to the state of the roads, the journey might certainly be accomplished in one half the time. Tiflis is accounted one of the finest cities in Asia, yet the streets are so extremely narrow, that it would be impossible to drive a carriage through the best of them The houses, which have no regular roofs, are built of the clay used for making bricks, mixed with gravel: the windows are small, and distributed without any attention to regularity. As the external walls of the houses are never plastered, the town presents a gloomy and even dirty appearance. The houses are generally two stories high, and earth huts are exceedingly numerous. There are many churches in Tiflis, but they are

neither large nor splendid. The market, or bazaar, according to Asiatic custom, is held in one of the principal streets, which is covered over from one end to the other with a wooden roof, intended apparently to protect the shops from the scorching rays of the sun. At the bazaar, merchandise of every description is sold; fruit, vegetables, silks, shawls, and wine, are frequently displayed on the same stall. In one corner a smith has established his workshop, from which the sparks issue in every direction in the very faces of the passengers. Tailors, locksmiths, and goldsmiths, pursue their avocations in the open air, except when rainy or windy weather obliges them to take shelter beneath the roof with which the street is covered. It would be unjust to assert that the inhabitants of Tiflis are not inclined to receive the benefits of education, if proper means were adopted for that purpose. It is said that the present chief intends to establish public schools, and that the materials for building them are already provided. The breeding of cattle is likewise to be introduced here, and in furtherance of this design, the chief has purchased upwards of 7000 sheep from some Persian khans subject to the Russian government. I understand that measures have already been taken for drawing up a circumstantial statistical description of the whole country. This work cannot fail to prove interesting. The results of the wisely-directed labours of an active government are every where observable."

On the Identity of Water-Spouts and Whirlwinds.

Even among the scientific and observing, a great diversity of opinion exists on the subject of the Water Spout, while among the majority of men, scarcely any thing accurate is known, either of the forms or the causes of this phenomenon. We have, therefore, extracted, for the benefit of our readers, the following paper on the subject, from that valuable work, the Philosophical Magazine, conducted by Alexander Tilloch. SIR,

If you think the following remarks relative to whirlwinds, or water spouts, worthy of a place in your Journal, you will oblige me by their insertion; as the opinions of travellers, and also of philosophers, differ greatly concerning this natural phenomenon, and any information afforded, by attentive observation, may therefore be interesting, if not useful.

An old stager, in the last number of the Naval Chronicle, seems to be of the opinion of Theophilus Lindsay, and some other philosophers; viz. that in the phenomenon called the water-spout, the water descends in columns from the clouds upon the earth or sea, and does not ascend from the sea upward to the clouds, which I believe to be the common opinion.