BOOK XI.

CHAPTER I.

THERE is no object in the city of Paris more gratifying to the heart, and no institution more conducive to good morals, than the Museum of Monuments. It is situated on the scite of the ci-devant convent of Augustine monks, and was established by Monsieur Alexander Le Noir, whose name it will immortalize. Who, that has not lost all the best feelings of his nature, would not take pleasure in musing among the monuments of so many illustrious dead? Where, surrounded by cypresses, roses and myrtles, stand the cenotaph of Molière, and the busts of Sully, Fénélon and Bossuet; Montesquieu, Fontenelle and Malesherbes; where a sarcophagus contains the ashes of La Fontaine; and where a medallion perpetuates the memory of Chevert!

As I was writing the name of "Chevert," my Lelius, the letter, in which you tell me, that you are become a prey to the profoundest melancholy, was brought to me. Ah! my friend, if every man were to note down all the experiments, he has tried; the number of established adages, he has found to be false; the observations, he has made on fortune and mankind; the cruel scenes, he has witnessed; the miseries he has endured; and the times he has been injured, calumniated, and de

ceived; what a melancholy catalogue of human woe and infirmity would be present to his mind!" But Heaven," as Sterne beautifully says, "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb;" and for nothing ought we to be more grateful to that Heaven for, than that accommodation of mind to circumstance, which alone prevents the miserable from laying down,—even with rapture, the load with which some are so intemperately burthened. In every country and in every age the good and wise have been the sport of fortune!

So many great

Illustrious spirits have conversed with woe,
Have in her school been taught, as are enough

To consecrate distress, and make ambition

E'en wish the frown, beyond the smile of fortune.1

Those are the men, against whom fortune takes an unerring aim, and sharpens her most fatal arrow:"Fortuna immeritos auget honoribus," says a celebrated writer, "fortuna innocuos claudibus afficit, justos illa viros pauperie gravat, indignos eadem divitiis beat : inconstans, fragilis, perfida et lubrica." What more ought to convince you, that fortune is not of etherial origin? What argument is required farther, than the knowledge, that, appearing to disdain virtue, she wrongs the bosom of wisdom? To be revenged of her, my Lelius-(for in a case like this revenge assumes the character of excellence), let me exhort you to draw

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1 In this wild world the fondest and the best
Are the most tried, most troubled, and distress'd.

Crabbe.

The

solace from her frowns. Since you cannot woo her to be your mistress, exert all the energies of your nature, and resolve to become her master. Be like the granite, impervious to the weather, and unassailable by time. Firmness of hope gives patience to endure; and the frost, which nips the leaves of the mulberry tree, kills not the silkworms curdled in its leaves. enemy, we have not the power to conciliate, therefore, must be subdued. In the struggle fortune will wound you, but the wound,-if you do not convert a difficulty into an impossibility,-will be healed by the touch of resolution; and as the swan subdues the eagle, when he ventures to attack her upon her own element, so will you, my Lelius, master Fortune, since she attacks you undeservedly. And when you have mastered her, from that moment she becomes your friend. ForFortune, wild and fickle and indiscriminate as she is, has still the virtue to admire, when she finds she has no power to conquer. And when Fortune stoops to admiration, the man, whom she admires, is the admiration of the world!

The good are better made by ill ;-
As odours crush'd are sweeter still!

Roger's Jacqueline.

But has melancholy no resources ?-Has she no charms?-Had the daughter of genius, as Milton calls her, no captivations, when she wooed Numa and Tully; Petrarch and Ariosto; Dante and Tasso; Milton and Euripides; Gray, Spenser, and Collins?

Believe me, my friend, those were men, not to be captivated by meretricious blandishments.

II.

Melancholy, which implies a disposition for the indulgence of contemplation, softens the heart, tunes every fibre with the nicest touch, and, flattering our feelings, even in the lap of misery, disposes the mind to derive an elevated satisfaction, from every grand and beautiful feature of Nature; from every virtuous exertion; and from all the secret sources of association. and sympathy. This is that sacred passion, to which Dyer alludes in his ruins of Rome:

There is a mood

(I sing not to the vacant and the young-)

There is a kindly mood of melancholy,

That wings the soul and points her to the skies.—

In

This is the species of melancholy, which soothes, delights, and captivates the soul. Indulging this infatuating propensity, the intrusion of mirth is grating to the feelings and offensive to the heart. It unhinges, by its turbulence and intoxication, the faculty of thought; it deranges the charm, by which we are bound; and dispels the luxury of meditation. wild and uncultivated scenes melancholy loves principally to reside. Magnificent buildings, splendid equipages, and crowded streets, associate but ill, with that delicacy of taste, which prompts the mind to seek the shade of some favourite grove, or the cool banks of some murmuring rivulet. These, and the cloud

capt mountain, the deep and sequestered glen, the ivied ruin, and the setting sun, are objects, which she most delights to contemplate. And sounds, most grateful to her ear, are the soft and melting accents of the flute; the aerial warblings of an Eolian lyre: the howling of the midnight storm; the distant voice of thunder; the foaming cataract, and an angry ocean. Milton loved to indulge in scenes, which conspired to awake emotions, arising from philosophic melancholy; -a passion so exquistely personified by Collins, in his Ode to the Passions; and by that noblest of all descriptive poets,―Thomson !

"I sat me down," says Milton,—

I sat me down to watch upon a bank
With ivy canopied, and interwove
With flaunting honeysuckle, and began,
Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy,
To meditate my rural minstrelsy,
Till fancy had her fill.

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This is not the green and yellow melancholy," to which Shakspeare alludes in Twelfth Night: nor the passion, pointed at by Fletcher in the poem whence Milton is supposed to have taken the idea of his Il Penseroso still less is it the corroding "offspring of phantasie," described in Burton's Anatomy; but, as defined in the context, "a disposition for the indulgence of contemplation :"-and to this elegant affection we may refer the solution of an expression, so common in Homer, in holy writ, and in Ossian ;