to virtuous friendship, if it can be made profitable, that that union which has received the divine approbation shall continue to eternity.

There is one expedient by which you may, in some degree, continue her presence-If you write down minutely what you remember of her from your earliest years, you will read it with great pleasure, and receive from it many hints of soothing recollection, when time shall remove her yet farther from you, and your grief shall be matured to veneration. To this, however painful for the present, I cannot but advise you, as to a source of comfort and satisfaction in the time to come, for all comfort and satisfaction is sincerely wished you, by, Dear Sir,

Your most obliged, most obedient,

and most humble Servant.

Mr. Pope to Mr. Digby, on the Death of his Brother.

DEAR SIR,

I HAVE a great inclination to write to you, though I cannot by writing, any more than I could by words, express what part I bear in your sufferings. Nature and esteem in you are joined to aggravate your affliction: the latter I have in a degree equal even to yours, and a tie of friendship approaches near to the tenderness of nature: yet, God knows, no man living is less fit to comfort you, as no man is more deeply sensible than myself of the greatness of the loss.. That very virtue which secures his present state from all the sorrows incident to ours, does but aggrandise our sensation of its being removed from our sight, from our

affection,

affection, and from our imitation; for the friendship and society of good men does not only make us happier, but it makes us better. Their death does but complete their felicity before our own, who probably are not yet arrived to that degree of perfection which merits an immediate reward. That your dear brother and my dear friend was so, I take his very removal to be a proof; Providence would certainly lend virtuous men to a world that so much wants them, as long as in its justice to them it could spare them to us. May my soul be with those who have meant well, and have acted well to that meaning! and, I doubt not, if this prayer be granted, I shall be with him. Let us preserve his memory in the way he would best like, by recollecting what his behaviour would have been in every incident of our lives to come, and doing in each, just as we think he would have done; so we shall have him always before our eyes, and in our minds, and (what is more) in our lives and manners. I hope when we shall meet him next, we shall be more of a piece with him, and consequently not to be evermore separated from him. I will add but one word that relates to what remains of yourself and me, since so valued a part of us is gone; it is to beg of you to accept, as yours by inheritance, of the vacancy he has left in a heart, which (while he could fill it with such hopes, wishes, and affections for him as suited a mortal creature) was truly and warmly his; and shall (I assure you in the sincerity of sorrow for my own loss) be faithfully at your service while I continue to love his memory, that is, while I con tinue to be myself.

ས༎

Miss Williams to a Friend, describing her Arrestation and Confinement, in consequence of a Deeree of the National Convention of France.

MY DEAR SIR,

Switzerland, Sept. 1794.

AFTER so long a suspension of our correspondence, after a silence like that of death, and a separation which for some time past seemed as final as if we had been divided by the limits of "that country from whose bourn no traveller returns,' with what grateful pleasure did I recognize your hand-writing, with what eagerness did I break the seal of your welcome letter, and with what soothing emotions receive the tidings of your welfare, and the assurance of your affection! Your letter was a talisman that served to conjure up a thousand images of sorrow and of joys that are past, and which were obliterated by the turbulent sensations of dismay and horror.

Perhaps, it will not be uninteresting to you to receive from me a sketch of the scenes which have passed in Paris since the 2d of June, an epocha to be for ever deplored by the friends of liberty, which seated a vulgar and sanguinary despot on the ruins of a throne, till the memorable 28th of July, 1794, when liberty, bleeding with a thousand wounds, revived once more. If the picture I send you of those extraordinary events be not well drawn, it is at least marked with the characters of truth, since I have been the witness of the scenes I describe, and have known personally all the principal actors. Those scenes, connected in my mind with all the detail of domestic sorrow, with the feelings of private sympathy, with the tears of mourning friendship, are impressed upon my

memory

memory in characters that are indelible. They rise in sad succession like the shades of Banquo's line, and pass along my shuddering recollection.

After having so long suffered without daring to utter a complaint, it will relieve my oppressed spirits to give you an account of our late situation; and, in so doing, I shall feel the same sort of melancholy pleasure as the mariner who paints the liorrors of the tempest when he has reached the harbour, and sheds a tender tear over his lost companions who have perished in the wreck-Ah! my dear friend, that overwhelming recollection fills my heart with anguish, which only they who have suffered can conceive. Those persons in whose society I most delighted, in whose cultivated minds and enlightened conversation I found the sole compensation for what I had lost in leaving my country and my friends-to see them torn from me for ever, to know the precise moment in which they were dragged to execution, to feel--but let me turn awhile from images of horror which I have considered but too deeply, and which have cast a sadness over my mind that can never, never be dispelled. Whenever they recur, a funeral veil seems to me to be spread over nature; and neither the consciousness of present, nor the assurance of future safety, neither the charms of society, nor all the graces, nor all the wonders of the scenes I am now contemplating can dissipate the gloom.

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Not long after the reign of Robespierre began, all passports to leave the country were refused, and the arrestation of the English residing in France was decreed by the national convention; but the very next day the decree was repealed on the representations of some French merchants, who shewed its impolicy. We therefore concluded that we had no such measures to fear in future; and we heard, from what we believed to

be good authority, that if any decree passed with respect to the English, it would be that of their being ordered to leave the Republic. The political clouds in the mean time gathered thick around the hemisphere: we heard rumours of severity and terror, which seemed like those hollow noises that roll in the dark gulph of the volcano, and portend its dangerous eruptions: but no one could calculate how far the threatened mischief would extend, and how wide a waste of ruin would desolate the land. Already considerable numbers were imprisoned as suspected-suspected! that in'definite word, which was tortured into every meaning of injustice and oppression, and became what the French call the mot de ralliement, the initiative term of captivity and death.

One evening when Bernardin St. Pierre, the author of the charming little novel of Paul and Virginia, was drinking tea with me, and while I was listening to a description he gave me of a small house, which he had lately built in the centre of a beautiful island of the river that flows by Essonne, which he was employed in decorating, and where he meant to realise some of the lovely scenes which his fine imagination has pictured in the Mauritius, I was suddenly called away from this fairy land by the appearance of a friend, who rushed into the roon, and with great agitation told us, that a decree Irad just passed in the national convention, ordering all the English in France to be put into arrestation in the space of four-and-twenty hours, and their property to be confiscated. We passed the night without sleep, and the following day in anxiety and peturbation not to be described, expecting every moment the commissaries of the revolutionary committee and their guards, to put in force the mandates of the convention. As the day advanced, our terror increased: in the evening we received

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