copyist of Lucretius. Yet he has written, as Dr. Warton judiciously asserts, with less tenderness and effect: He feels the father's and the husband's bliss, His infants climb, and struggle for a kiss; His modest house strict chastity maintains, Warton. "Our own language boasts of a variety of imitations of this elegiac and exquisite passage; of which several are possessed of great feeling and simplicity. The following is from the pathetic muse of Gray: For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, No children run, to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees, the envied kiss to share. "The two last lines are very nearly a verbal translation. The next imitation, to which I shall refer, is by Thomson; it is freer than that of Gray, but executed with equal felicity. It occurs in his Winter, to which season it particulary adverts: In vain for him th' officious wife prepares With tears of artless innocence. Alas! Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold, Ver. 311. "It is not unlikely that Thomson, rather than Lucretius, has been copied in this delineation by Klopstock, in the following verses, which comprise a part of the meditations of the repentant Abadonna: Come, let me see the man that yonder lies Dying, and wrung with anguish as he dies; And mark his gory wounds. In dead of night To clasp his babes, that round their mother's knee, 'Equally in point, with both these citations, is the following, by Collins; affording a picture which yields to neither of them in tenderness or beauty. It comprises a part of his well-known description of the Kelpie, or Water-fiend : For him, in vain, his anxious wife shall wait, Or wander forth to meet him on his way; For him, in vain, at to-fall of the day, His babes shall linger at th' unclosing gate. Ah! ne'er shall he return! "I add the following from Dyer, because, though it offers a parallel, if not a copied image, it directs to a happier purpose. The poet is representing the agricultural province of a worthy cottager with whom he was acquainted, and who never suffered the growth of useless trees about the few acres he occupied : Only a slender tuft of useful ash, And mingled beech, and elm, securely tall, The little smiling cottage, where at eve He meets his rosy children at the door, Fleece, book I. "Of a purport precisely similar, and pregnant with similar imagery, is the ensuing address of a cottager to his beloved wife, from the Idyls of Gessner, with which I shall conclude this note. It occurs in his Herbst morgen: "When seated by thee, let the pent-up winds put forth their rage; let the snow-storm cover the face of the earth; then chiefly feel I that thou art every thing to me. May the fulness of my prosperity be the lot of yourselves, ye lovely children! adorned with every grace of your mother, which blossoms as a blessing upon us both! The first syllable she taught you to lisp was to let me know that ye loved me. As I return from the field or the flock, joyfully ye throng together, and call to me from the sill of the door; and, clinging round my knees, receive, with childish rapture, the little presents I bring you-O how does your pure and innocent happiness transport me!"-Vol. I. page 502. In adverting to the poetic representations of death and its harbingers, some observations occur which are not unworthy the attention of biblical critics: "The personification of Death, in the act of executing the divine commands, is exhibited with great difference, both as to features and character, amongst different nations. Perhaps the most mean and insignificant delineation is the common monkish one of a skeleton with a dart in one hand, and an hour-glass in the other, ghauntly striding towards the victim of his attack while one of the most terrible and best defined, is that of the Scandinavian poets, who represent him as mounted on horseback, fleeing, in the dead of night, with inconceivable rapidity, over hedges and ditches, valleys, mountains, and rivers, in pursuit of his prey, meagre in flesh, wan in colour, and horrible in aspect, the horse possessing the same character as the rider. Many of the German ballads, and especially those of Bürger, have, of late, made a free use of this personification; and it has been contended that the picture is altogether of Scandinavian origin, and peculiar to the bards of that country: yet what will such antiquarians say to the following parallel passage in the APOCALYPSE, ch. vi. 8. which, while it evinces every characteristic feature of the foregoing imagery, adds a variety of collateral circumstances of the utmost sublimity and terror, unknown to Runic poetry, and infinitely superior to its proudest and most energetic specimens: 'And I looked, and behold! a ghastly horse, and the name of his rider was DEATH; and HELL followed him. And they were empowered to exterminate a fourth part of the earth with sword, and with famine, and with pestilence, and with the wild beasts of the earth.' The word here translated GHASTLY, XAwpoc, is peculiarly expressive in the original. It is more generally rendered pale, but this is still less adequate to its real spirit; it means that green-sick, wan, and exanimate hue which is pathognomically descriptive of the disease termed chlorosis."-Vol. II. page 585. Again, in the very next page, while commenting upon that "daring dithyrambic expression," "We change the covering of the skies,' Dr. Good remarks, that the sacred writings furnish many similar examples, and quotes the originals of Psalm cii. 25, 26, and of Isaiah xl. 21-23. Rendering the latter part of the citation from the Psalm thus, -"Even as a garment shall they be worn out, And when thou choosest to change them they shall be changed. I shall be forgiven for inserting the remainder of the note. "Have ye not known? have ye not heard? Hath it not been published to you from the beginning? not understood from the foundations of the earth? He who sitteth upon the circle of the earth, And to whom its inhabitants are as grasshoppers; Who unfoldeth the heavens as a curtain, And spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in; Who reduceth magistrates, yea, monarchs, to nothing- "The arrangement here presented, of this sublime passage of the original, is different from that afforded by any modern version with which I am acquainted, yet I have no doubt that it is what was intended by the prophet himself. It gives a sense far more magnificent than that in common acceptation; is more consonant with the context, and prevents the necessity of arbitrarily supplying the verb it is, at the opening of verse 22, for which there is no authority in the Hebrew. Upon turning to the Septuagint, I find, also, that I am countenanced in this rendering by the translation there offered, which, in ver 23, runs as follows: Ὁ διδους αρχοντας ὡς ουδεν αρχειν, ΤΗΝ ΔΕ ΓΗΝ ὩΣ ΟΥΔΕΝ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ. "The word curtain, in ver. 22. which I have continued from our standard version, is rendered awning by Dr. Stock, who justifies the change by a note cited from bishop Lowth, as occurring in Shaw's Travels. With due deference to these very excellent authorities, I still think the standard rendering preferable. The kind of curtain, immediately referred to, is that which |