the appearance; and your majesty cannot take it amiss, if such an author hints, that His secret approbation is of infinitely greater value than the commendation of men, who may be easily mistaken and are too apt to flatter their superiors.

But if he had been told the truth, such a case as his will certainly strike your majesty with astonishment, and may raise that commiseration in your royal breast which he has in vain endeavoured to excite in those of his friends; who by the most unreasonable and ill-founded conceit in the world, have imagined, that a thinking being could for seven years together live a stranger to its own powers, exercises, operations and state, and to what the great God has been doing in it and to it.

'If your majesty, in your most retired address to the King of Kings, should think of so singular a case, you may, perhaps, make it your devout request, that the reign of your beloved sovereign and consort may be renowned to all posterity by the recovery of a soul now in the utmost ruin, the restoration of one utterly lost at present amongst men.

• And should this case affect your royal breast, you will recommend it to the piety and prayers of all the truly devout, who have the honour to be known to your majesty: many such doubtless there are: though courts are not usually the places where the devout resort, or where devotion reigns. And it is not improbable, that multitudes of the pious throughout the land may take a case to heart, that under your majesty's patronage comes thus recommended.

Could such a favour as this restoration be obtained from Heaven by the prayers of your majesty, with what a transport of gratitude would the recovered being throw himself at your majesty's feet, and adoring the Divine Power and Grace, profess himself,

Madam, Your majesty's most obliged

and dutiful servant.'

This dedication, which is no where feeble or absurd, but in the places where the object of his phrenzy was immediately before him, his friends found means to suppress; wisely considering, that a book, to which it should be prefixed, would certainly be condemned without examination; for few would have required stronger evidence of its inutility, than that the author, by his dedication, appeared to be mad. The copy, however, was preserved, and has been transcribed into the blank leaves before one of the books which is now in the library of a friend to this undertaking, who is not less distinguished by his merit than his rank, and who recommended it as a literary curiosity, which was in danger of being lost for want of a repository in which it might be preserved.

N° 89. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1753.

Præcipua tamen ejus in commovendâ miseratione virtus, ut quidam in hac eum parte omnibus ejusdem operis autoribus præferant. QUINTILIAN.

His great excellence was in moving compassion, with respect to which many give him the first place of all the writers of that kind.

TO THE ADVENTURER.

SIR,

Ir is usual for scholars to lament, with indiscriminating regret, the devastations committed on ancient libraries, by accident and time, by superstition, ignorance, and gothicism; but the loss is very far from being in all cases equally irreparable, as the want of some kinds of books may be much more easily supplied than that of others. By the interruption that sometimes happens in the succession of philosophical opinions, the mind is emancipated from traditionary systems, recovers its native elasticity which had been benumbed by custom, begins to examine with freedom and fresh vigour, and to follow truth instead of authority. The loss of writings, there ore, in which reasoning is concerned, is not, perhaps, so great an evil to mankind, as of those which describe characters and facts.

To be deprived of the last books of Livy, of the satires of Archilochus, and the comedies of Menander, is a greater misfortune to the republic of

literature, than if the logic and the physics of Aristotle had never descended to posterity.

Two of your predecessors, Mr. Adventurer, of great judgment and genius, very justly thought that they should adorn their lucubrations by publishing, one of them a fragment of Sappho, and the other an old Grecian hymn to the Goddess Health: and, indeed, I conceive it to be a very important use of your paper, to bring into common light those beautiful remains of ancient art, which by their present situation are deprived of that universal admiration they so justly deserve, and are only the secret enjoyment of a few curious readers. In imitation, therefore, of the examples I have just mentioned, I shall send you, for the instruction and entertainment of your readers, a fragment of Simonides and of Menander.

Simonides was celebrated by the ancients for the sweetness, correctness, and purity of his style, and his irresistible skill in moving the passions. It is a sufficient panegyric that Plato often mentions him with approbation. Dionysius places him among those polished writers, who excel, in a smooth volubility, and flow on, like plenteous and perennial rivers, in a course of even and uninterrupted harmony.

It is to this excellent critic that we are indebted for the preservation of the following passage, the tenderness and elegance of which scarcely need be pointed out to those who have taste and sensibility. Danaë, being by her merciless father enclosed in a chest and thrown into the sea with her child, the poet proceeds thus far to relate her distress:

Ὅτε λαρνακι ἐν δαιδαλέα ανεμος
Βρέμη πνεων, κινηθεισα δε λιμνά
Δείματι ερειπεν ̓ οὔτ ̓ αδιανταίσι Ξ
Παρείαις, αμφι τε Περσει βαλλές

When the raging wind began to roar, and the waves to beat so violently on the chest as to threaten to overset it, she threw her arm fondly around Perseus, and said, the tears trickling down her cheeks, O my son, what sorrows do I undergo! But thou art wrapt in a deep slumber; thou sleepest soundly like a sucking child, in this joyless habitation, in this dark and dreadful night, lighted only by the glimmerings of the moon! Covered with thy purple mantle, thou regardest not the waves that dash around thee, nor the whistling of the winds. Ο thou beauteous babe! If thou wert sensible of this calamity, thou wouldest bend thy tender ears to my complaints. Sleep on, I beseech thee, O my child! Sleep with him, O ye billows! and sleep likewise my distress!'

Those who would form a full idea of the delicacy of the Greek, should attentively consider the following happy imitation of it, which I have reason to believe, is not so extensively known or so warmly admired as it deserves; and which, indeed, far excels the original.

The poet, having pathetically painted a great princess taking leave of an affectionate husband on his death-bed, and endeavouring afterwards to com