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virtue as well as ability, he has all the respect which their own eccentricities will allow; and for others, who have neither ability nor virtue, his pity stands in the place of a higher feeling, and he can forgive to their common nature as men, what he must not overlook in their example as characters. This however is deviating into politics.

Like most of the poetical inventions of modern times, the idea of Apollo's holding sessions and elections is of Italian origin; but having been treated in it's most ordinary light, with the degradation of the God into a mere critic or chairman, it has hitherto received none of those touches of painting, and combinations of the familiar and fanciful, of which it appears so provocative, and which the present trifle is an

attempt to supply. The pieces it has already produced in our language, are the Session of the Poets, by Sir John Suckling; another Session, by an anonymous author, in the first volume of State Poems; the Trial for the Bays, by Lord Rochester; and the Election of a Poet Laureat, by Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham. They are for the most part vulgar and poor, with that strange affectation of slovenliness, which the lower species of satire, in those times, appears to have mistaken for a vigorous negligence or gallant undress.

But the author is getting on his critical ground again, and forgets that he must now be regarded as having entered his own road of pretension, and be criticised as a poet himself. The necessity is rather perplexing to one who has been making so

free with others, and who scarcely considers himself as having finished his own studies in poetry; but as it is, he has subjoined to the Feast of the Poets a few little pieces of a graver description, in order that those, who in return for being lightly regarded, are eager to make accusations of levity, may see that he has at least a taste for more serious enjoyment.

Should a state of health, not very accommodating, continue to allow him in his imprisonment the use of his pen, it is his intention, by the beginning of next year, to bring out a piece of some length, with which he is varying less agreeable studies, and in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate harmony of the English heroic.

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