high road to happiness; all his parts, and all his acquirements, did not guard him against obliquity and crooked policy, which in this as in most instances generally defeat their own purpose. He is one added to the many instances, which pointedly prove after all the contrivances of cunning and the deep stratagems of finesse, THAT HONESTY IS The Best POLICY; THAT HER WÄYS ARE WAYS OF PLEASANTNESS, AND ALL HER PATHS ARE PEACE.

SEMIR

EMIRAMIS, a tragedy, translated from the French by a military man to whom I have applied the term Cerulean in a former volume.

I mention it in this place to prove, that there were persons in the world who agreed with me in opinion concerning the person in question, as my mode of introducing him in the late Lord Lyttleton's article, has been termed cruel and unchristian.

This dramatic performance afforded an opportunity to a satirical poet to lash the writer in that masterly but unjustifiable poem the Diaboliad.

Among the various candidates who offer to fill the vacant throne of hell, which forms the plan of the poem, the young peer of unhappy memory is introduced, and with him the well.

known individual whom I am accused of defaming.

"Behind him came, in regimentals drest,

The brazen gorget hanging at his breast,

Th' officious captain, ready to obey,

Whate'er might be the business of the day.

With solemn look the conscious peer began,

Thus to address the military

man; "Friend, cousin

Together when we

stray'd Through vice's public walk and private shade;

I found thee apt in every artful wile,

Proud to defame and eager to beguile;

When to give life to Sunday's tedious hour,

We wish'd to make the pedant parson low'r,

To make the simple stare, the virtuous sigh,

Your tongue pour'd forth the ready blasphemy; Whene'er I wanted falsehood to supply

The place of truth, you found the ready lie

many more?

Swear sir

lished by a learned Benedictine, a native and inhabitant of the

captain swore;

Adriatic sea, and not far from

In this work, the holy father

disgrace his cloth,

This short extract with other reasons I could give, proves that I was not very much mistaken in my man; so harsh a portrait in a poem at the time very generally popular, and which went through many editions, if there had not been truth and justice in the outline, would have been formally contradicted.

HIPWRECK OF SAINT PAUL. The precise spot which was the scene of the disaster of this apostle, who was first a persecutor, and afterwards a convert to christianity, has exercised the critical powers of modern writers and geographers; the island of Malta, lately delivered from the fraternal embraces of our French neighbours by the arms of England, has been considered by the majority as the island on which the ship was stranded.

But in the eighteenth century, an ingenious well written dissertation, and in Latin, worthy

birth was the land on which the miraculous escapes of the christian prisoner were exhibited; and it must be confessed that some of his arguments by which the hypothesis is supported, have considerable weight.

He proves that Meleda, in the age of the apostles was called Melita; that the island of Malta, properly speaking is not in the Adriatic sea; that the wind called Euroclidon, a south east not a north east wind, as it has been sometimes described, could not have driven a bark, sailing from the coast of Palestine to Italy, on the rocky shores of Malta; and lastly that the term Barbarian, applied in the New Testament to the inhabitants of the island where St. Paul was shipwrecked, was and is perfectly applicable to the inhabitants of the coast on which Meleda is situated, but could not in any sense be properly applied to the Greeks who inhabited Malta.

This author further asserts that there are no quicksands, such as St. Paul describes, near

Malta,

In Meleda, vipers of a malignant species abound, and their bite is often attended with fatal consequences.

In answer to those who insist that Malta being free froin venomous reptiles was owing to the miraculous interposition of St. Paul, it may be and is observed that a miracle of such importance, had it taken place, would surely have been recorded by Saint Luke, as well as the cure of Publius, and the minute circumstance of the flag borne by the ship.

To conclude, in the words of this well-informed Benedictine, Ignatio Giorgi; those who support the commonly received opinion that Malta is the spot, must allow the Adriatic Sea to extend to that island; that a ship was driven to the south by a southeast wind; that the inhabitants

It has been lamented by a modern writer, that it costs as much to besiege a city as to found a colony; yet when we recollect the destruction and bloodshed which generally take place on such occasions, this reflection should seem to be a source of consolation, rather than regret; as heroes, whom no motives of humanity can restrain, are often deterred from persevering in their career of ambition by exhausted finances.

The business of taking places indeed has been rendered by the skill of engineers a matter of arithmetical calculation, and has been thought a business of such certainty and mathematical demonstration, that a paper was said to be found in the cabinet of a modern general who died a few years ago, on which was written an alphabetical list of all the strong holds in Europe, arranged in columns, similar to a military return, with spaces appropriate to each, in which the money, number of lives, and quantity of ammunition neces

sary

sary to be sacrificed, but which would certainly succeed, were mentioned.

It was the opinion of this gentleman that there was no place, defile, or position however guarded by nature and art, which might not be carried by a general resolved to employ all possible means in attaining his end; who would beset a garrison so closely till their diseases or the death of his own men had produced contagion; who on being told that materials for advancing and forming lines of contra-vallation, parapets, &c. could not be procured, on account of the rocky nature of the soil, would coolly reply," you cannot surely want materials, with such numbers of dead bodies; use them without delay, it will save the labour of the pick-axe and the spade, and we shall have great plenty;" or finally, who sending a detachment of eight hundred men, on the forlorn hope, and being asked why he detached so many, answered that the besieged could not be tempted to spring a mine for a less mumber; that the mine must at all events be sprung, or nothing could be done; as during the noise, smoke, and confusion, he proposed an assault in a distant spot; that as to the men who were killed off, he acted upon a

certainty, having an accurate return of the number of the besieged, and he was able to last them out.

To such a commander, who would pile up the bodies of his slaughtered troops, till they overtopped the Rock of Gibraltar, or choak the Rhine with their mutilated corses, till he had made it fordable, what is impossible?

On the subject of sieges, it would be an useful object of investigation to enumerate the various substances which in case of famine or scarcity would af ford a temporary support to animal life.

The prejudices of persons who have never tasted it are strong against the use of the flesh of horses as an article of diet; but experience has proved it to be. salutary and nutritious: nor is there any reason for doubting whether dogs, cats, rats, mice, and particularly snails come under a similar description.

In case of a total deprivation of the usual means of subsistence, starving might be effectually prevented by large earthworms, cleaned and scoured in moss; by beetles, scarabœi, locusts, and by frogs, which however revolting to a republican stomach, made an excellent ragout under the ancien regime; by leather, purified by water

from

from the ingredients of the tanner and the currier; by horn, ivory, and bones; by pasteboard, paper, papier machée, glue, candles, oil, and soap deprived by an easy process of its caustic alkaly, and by quills; by the bark of trees, by nuts of almost every kind, by acorns, mast, and by the roots of a variety of vegetables, particularly those of beet, comfrey, and marsh mallows.

But under so aweful a visitation, not only what, but how *much would keep a human creature alive becomes an object of considerable importance.

In several parts of this collection, I have ventured to think, that many persons, who consider themselves as moderate eaters, generally speaking, feed too freely. And although a diet rigidly abstemious and extremely attenuated would not be favourable to laborious exertion, I am of opinion that in a situation where the lives of a number of persons depended on making their store of provision endure as long as possible, where to keep alive rather than to feast and carouse was the object, the human body might subsist on the sixteenth part of what we consume in the ordinary meals of peace and plenty. An instance strongly corroborating this assertion oc

VOL. IV..

Possessing quick discernment, keen wit, and genuine humour, which, as is the nature of all humour, was sometimes gross, and sometimes inelegant,-forgetting that principibus placuisse, viris was the maxim which conducted Horace so comfortably through life, and that panegyric was in fact the staple commodity of his office, Skelton lashed without mercy the errors and corruptions of the Church of Rome, the vices of the monks, and the indolence of the clergy.

His writings, as generally happens with personal satire, were quickly purchased and eagerly perused by the very persons who were afterwards the most forward to vilify, traduce, and persecute the man who composed them.