Her eyes shed mercy wheresoe'er they shine, "But, oh! whatever cause has mov'd her hate, The God within perhaps may touch her breast, Savage's excellent friend, Mr. Hill, by the foregoing poetical statement, encouraged (as is known) a subscription to a Miscellany of Poems for his benefit. "To this Miscellany," says Johnson, "he (Savage) wrote a preface, in which he gives an account of his mother's cruelty in a very uncommon strain of humour, and with a gaiety of imagination which the success of his subscription probably produced." This "preface" is somewhat long, but parts of it are very amusing; and we will not withhold from the reader, in this place, a morceau which Johnson has so highly commended. It is as follows: "Crudelis mater magis, an puer improbus ille? Improbus ille puer, crudelis tu quoque mater.”—Virg. "My readers, I am afraid, when they observe Richard Savage joined so close and so constantly to son of the late Earl Rivers, will impute to a ridiculous vanity what is the effect of an unhappy necessity, which my hard fortune has thrown me under. I am to be pardoned for adhering a little tenaciously to my father, because my mother will allow me to be nobody, and has almost reduced me, among heavier afflictions, to that uncommon kind of want which the Indians of America complained of at our first settling among them, when they came to beg names of the English, because (said they) we are poor men of ourselves, and have none we can lay claim to. "The good nature of those to whom I have not the honour to be known, would forgive me the ludicrous turn of this beginning, if they knew but how little reason I have to be merry. It was my misfortune to be son of the above mentioned Earl, by the late Countess of Macclesfield, (now widow of Colonel Henry Bret,) whose divorce, on occasion of the amour which I was a consequence of, has left something on record, which I take to be very remarkable; and it is this: certain of our great Judges, in their temporal decisions, act with a spiritual regard to Heretical Divinity, and, in particular, to the Ten Commandments, two of which seem, in my case, to have influenced their opinions. Thou shalt not commit adultery pointed fullest on my mother; but as to the Lord's visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, it was considered as what could regard me only; and in that reason, I suppose, it had been inconsistent with the rules of sanctity to assign provision, out of my mother's returned estate, for support of an infant sinner. "Thus, while legally the son of one Earl, and naturally of another, I am nominally nobody's son at all; for the lady having given me too much father, thought it but an equivalent deduction to leave me no mother, by way of balance; so I am sported into the world, a kind of shuttlecock between Law and Nature. If Law had not beaten me back, by the stroke of an Act, on purpose, I had not been above wit, by the privilege of a man of quality; nay, I might have preserved into the bargain, the lives of Duke Hamilton and Lord Mohun, whose dispute arose from the estate of that Earl of Macclesfield, whom (but for the mentioned Act) I must have called father; and if Nature had not struck me off with a stronger blow than Law did, the other Earl, who was most emphatically my father, could never have been told I was dead, when he was about to enable me, by his will, to have lived to some purpose. An unaccountable severity of a mother, whom I was then not old enough to have deserved it from, and by which I am a single unhappy instance among that nobleman's natural children, and thrown friendless on the world, without means of supporting myself, and without authority to apply to those whose duty I know it is to support me. "Thus, however ill qualified I am to live by my wits, I have the best plea in the world for attempting it, since it is too apparent that I was born to it. Having wearied my judgment with fruitless endeavours to be happy, I gave the reins to my fancy, that I might learn, at least, to be easy." The author proceeds-" But I cease to speak of myself, that I may say something of my Miscellany;" and accordingly he here enters into some particulars relative to that work, which it is needless to transcribe. We take up the three concluding paragraphs of the preface: "To return to the lady, my mother. Had the celebrated Mr. Locke been acquainted with her example, it had certainly appeared in his Chapter against innate practical principles, because it would have completed his instances of enormities; some of which, though not exactly in the order that he mentions them, are as follow: Have there not been (says he) whole nations, and those of the most civilized people, amongst whom the exposing their children to perish by want, or wild beasts, has been a practice as little condemned or scrupled as the begetting them? Were I inclinable to be serious, I could easily prove that I have not been more gently dealt with by Mrs. Bret: but if this is any way foreign to my case, I shall find a nearer example in the whimsical one that ensues. "It is familiar (says the aforecited author) among the Mengrelians, a people professing Christianity, to bury their children alive, without scruple. There are indeed sundry sects of Christians, and I have often wondered which could be my mamma's; but now I find she piously professes and practises Christianity after the manner of the Mengrelians. She industriously obscured me, when my fortune depended on my being known, and, in that sense, she may be said to have buried me alive; and sure, like a Mengrelian, she must have committed the action without scruple, for she is a woman of spirit, and can see the consequence without remorse. The Caribbees (continues my author) were wont to castrate their children, in order to fat and eat them. Here, indeed, I can draw no parallel; for, to speak justice of the lady, she never contributed ought to have me pampered, but always promoted my being starved: nor did she, even in my infancy, betray fondness enough to be suspected of a design to devour me; but, on the contrary, not enduring me ever to approach her, offered a bribe to have me shipped off, in an odd manner, to one of the plantations. When I was about fifteen, her affection began to awake, and, had I but known my interest, I had been handsomely provided for. In short, I was solicited to be bound apprentice to a very honest and respectable occupation-a shoemaker, an offer which I undutifully rejected. I was, in fine, unwilling to understand her in a literal sense, and hoped that, like the prophets of old, she might have hinted her mind in a kind of parable, or proverbial way of speaking; as thus-That one time or other, I might, on due application, have the honour of taking the length of her foot. "Mr. Locke mentions another set of people that despatch their children, if a pretended astrologer declares them to have unhappy stars. Perhaps my mamma has procured some cunning man to calculate my nativity; or, having had some ominous dream, which preceded my birth, the dire event may have appeared to her in the dark and dreary bottom of a china cup, where coffee-stains are often consulted for prophecies, and held as infallible, as were the leaves of the ancient sybils. To be partly serious: I am rather willing to wrong her judgment, by suspecting it to be tainted a little with the tenets of superstition, than suppose she can be mistress of a seared conscience, and act on no principle at all.” Such is the "humorous" preface, which we leave without comment to our reader's digestion. FROM THE EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. AN ESSAY ON PUNCTUATION. THE purpose of points, or stops, in writing, is not to mark periods of graceful pause, but to distinguish sentences, the members of sentences, and the intersections of those members. Many persons, misapprehending this, and studiously careful to point their writings according to their erroneous notion, make strange shipwreck of real perspicuity. They would mar the following sentence with an unnecessary and impeding comma; thus-"All things connected with the confederacy, were proceeding prosperously." Evidently this is wrongly pointed. If the sentence is to be divided at all, there should be a comma after things as well as after confederacy, otherwise the currency of the meaning is hindered. The nominative case in a sentence has a necessary and immediate connexion with its word. As the sentence "All things," &c. is (erroneously) pointed above, this connexion is undone. There the six words "All things connected with the confederacy" are made the undivided nominative, and this nominative is separated from the verb it governs by an interpolated comma. Had the sentence been written "All things, connected with the confederacy, were proceeding prosperously," there would have been no precise blemish, for the words "connected with the confederacy" would have stood as an explanation of, or addition to, the nominative "All things;" so that the nominative "All things" and the verb "were" would not have been disjoined, or rendered irrelative, because in cases of this sort the commas are parenthesitical. There are more errors respecting the different uses of the comma than any other point. We will take a sentence. "He reprobated, also, the odious, because unsatisfactory task, of every day struggling for the redress of injuries." The author, or compositor, very properly puts a comma after reprobated, and a comma after also, in order to parenthesize the word also, as the verb reprobated is immediately and naturally connected with the accusative case, the odious task, which it governs, just as the nominative and verb are connected. The author, further, very properly puts a comma after odious, which adjective is connected with task, and not with because, the words because unsatisfactory being merely explanatory. But here the author's, or compositor's, accuracy deserts him. He forgets that the adjective odious is connected immediately with task, and carelessly includes task in the explanatory parenthesis because unsatisfactory. The words because unsatisfactory form a distinct and perfect clause, and must be pointed off accordingly; by which means the adjective and substantive odious task will have a manifest connexion. The author has then omitted a comma after unsatisfactory; but (perhaps to make up, on an arithmetical principle, for the omission) we find one obtruded after task, effectually cutting the connexion betwixt that word and those following it. The currency of the sentence obviously is"the odious task of struggling." Lastly, the author has forgotten to point off "every day," by inserting a comma after of, and one after day. Of and struggling, forming together the perfect genitive case of a participle, are the words connected. Every day is an addition to the force and meaning of the passage, which might as well be placed after "struggling" as before. The author's punctuation of the sentence in question, partly false and partly true, is (my readers will perceive) as follows: "He reprobated, also, the odious, because unsatisfactory task, of every day struggling for the redress of injuries." The true punctuation is this: "He reprobated, also, the odious, because unsatisfactory, task of, every day, struggling for the redress of injuries. The accurate observance of the natural and immediate connexion of words (how distantly soever placed from each other) is all in all, with respect to the right distribution of commas. On this part of my subject, therefore, I will say no more. But there is in fashion an irregular method of lengthening the comma's pause, which I must briefly notice. I allude to the smart dashes so liberally employed by writers of the present day. These, besides being occasionally used alone, are not unfrequently appended to legitimate points. Thus we see the comma dashed (,-) and so on with the rest. When the comma is dashed, it is always to lengthen the pause. The seldomer this is done the better; but there are cases in which a good enough purpose is answered. Thus, when the last clause of a sentence is a sort of amplification or exposition of the preceding:"His taste for indiscriminate amusements rose into a passion for excitements of a higher character,-for the movements of great interests and great efforts." Also, when an intermediate parenthesitical clause is designed to be emphatic, the effect is good; as here-"When he encountered Adhemar, ever surrounded now by companions,assuredly by design,-no cordial kindling of countenance answered to the affectionate light in his." Writers must distinguish, however, between the dashed comma (if I may so express myself) and the simple dash. In many cases, where the latter may be used with considerable effect, the former would annihilate construction: as in the following line. "The paths of glory lead-but to the grave!" A dashed comma (,-) after lead would obviously destroy the connexion betwixt lead and the following words. And here I will remark, that care must be taken that the dash be properly placed. The only place it could hold properly in the above line is the one it holds. Put it after glory, and it becomes nugatory: expectation would not, in that case, be defeated, because it would never have been excited: in fact, we should have formed no idea of the subsequent part of the sentence. Place the dash after but, or after to the, writing the verse or, "The paths of glory lead but-to the grave;" "The paths of glory lead but to the-grave;" and the meditated object is unattained; for in neither case is expectation raised, so in neither is it defeated. If you write without check-"The paths of glory lead but-" nothing is expected from them; no bright goal can be anticipated; our hopes with regard to It is unpleasant to see sentences clogged and overloaded with false points; but I would here observe, that, in common practice, it is frequently not amiss to dse fewer points than strictness would require. |