and conviction clofes his periods. This man fhall be my future guide: I will learn his doctrines, and imitate his life.'

"Be not too hafty, faid Imlac, to

truft, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they difcourfe like angels, but they live like men."

Raffelas, who could not conceive how any man could reason fo forcibly without feeling the cogency of his own arguments; paid his vifit in a few days, and was denied admiffion. He had now learned the power of money, and made his way by a piece of gold to the inner apartment, where he found the philofopher in a room half darkened, with his eyes mifty, and his face pale. "Sir, faid he, you are

come at a time when all human friend

fhip is useless; what I fuffer cannot be remedied, what I have loft cannot be fupplied. My daughter, my only daughter, from whofe tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age, died last night of a fever. My views, my purposes, my hopes are at an end: I am now a lonely being difunited from fociety."

"Sir, faid the prince, mortality is an event by which a wife man can never be furprised: we know that death is always near, and it should therefore always be expected." Young man, answered the philofopher, you fpeak like one that has never felt the pangs of feparation.” "Have you then forgot the precepts, faid Raffelas, which you fo powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no ftrength to arm the heart against calamity? Confider,

that

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that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reafon are always the fame." "What comfort, faid the mourner, can truth and reafon afford me? of what effect are they now, but to tell me, that my daughter will not be restored?”

The prince, whofe humanity would not fuffer him to infult misery with reproof, went away convinced of the emptinefs of rhetorical found, and the inefficacy of polished periods and ftudied fen

tences.

CHAP.

CHA P. XIX.

A Glimpse of pastoral life.

E was ftill eager upon the fame en

HE

quiry; and, having heard of a

hermit, that lived near the lowest cataract of the Nile, and filled the whole country with the fame of his fanctity, refolved to vifit his retreat, and enquire whether that felicity, which publick life could not afford, was to be found in folitude; and whether a man, whofe age and virtue made him venerable, could teach any peculiar art of fhunning evils, or enduring them.

Imlac

Imlac and the princefs agreed to accompany him, and, after the neceffary preparations, they began their journey. Their way lay through fields, where fhepherds tended their flocks, and the lambs were playing upon the pasture. "This, faid the poet, is the life which has been often celebrated for its innocence and quiet let us pass the heat of the day among the shepherds tents, and know

whether all our fearches are not to terminate in pastoral fimplicity.”

The proposal pleased them, and they induced the shepherds, by fmall presents and familiar questions, to tell their opinion of their own ftate: they were fo rude and ignorant, fo little able to compare the good with the evil of the occupation, and fo Indiftinct in their nar