made the constituents of his character; for a man so mild and gentle to temper his rage was not difficult. The next line is unharmonious in its sound, and mean in its conception; the opposition is obvious; and the word lash used absolutely, and without any modification, is gross and improper. To be above temptation in poverty, and free from corruption among the great, is indeed such a peculiarity as deserved notice. But to be a safe companion is praise merely negative, arising not from the possession of virtue, but the absence of a vice, and that one of the most odious. As little can be added to his character, by asserting that he was lamented in his end. Every man that dies is, at least by the writer of his epitaph, supposed to be lamented, and therefore this lamentation does no honour to Gay. The eight first lines have no grammar, the adjectives are without any substantive, and the epithets without a subject. The thought in the last line, that Gay is buried in the bosoms of the worthy and the good, who are distinguished only to lengthen the line, is so dark that few understand it; and so harsh, when it is explained, that still fewer approve. XII. Intended for Sir ISAAC NEWTON-In Westminster ISAACUS NEWTONIUS: Testantur Tempus, Natura, Cœlum : Hoc marmor fatetur. Nature, and Nature's laws, lay hid in night: Of this Epitaph, short as it is, the faults seem not to be very few. Why part should be Latin and part English, it is not easy to discover. In the Latin, the opposition of immortalis and mortalis, is a mere sound, or a mere quibble; he is not immortal in any sense contrary to that in which he is mortal. In the verses the thought is obvious, and the words night and light are too nearly allied. XIII. On EDMUND, Duke of Buckingham, who died in the 19th year of his age, 1735. If modest youth, with cool reflection crown'd, This epitaph Mr. Warburton prefers to the rest, but I know not for what reason. To crown with reflection is surely a mode of speech approaching to nonsense. Opening virtue blooming round, is something like tautology; the six following lines are poor and prosaic. Art is another couplet used for arts, that a rhyme may be had to heart. The six last lines are the best, but not excellent. The rest of his sepulchral performances hardly deserve the notice of criticism. The contemptible dia logue between HE and SHE, should have been suppressed for the author's sake. In his last epitaph on himself, in which he attempts to be jocular upon one of the few things that make wise men serious, he confounds the living man with the dead: Under this stone, or under this sill, When a man is once buried, the question under what he is buried, is easily decided. He forgot that though he wrote the epitaph in a state of uncertainty, yet it could not be laid over him till his grave was made. Such is the folly of wit when it is ill employed. THE BRAVERY OF THE ENGLISH COMMON SOLDIERS. BY those who have compared the military genius of the English with that of the French nation, it is remarked that the French officers will always lead, if the soldiers will follow; and that the English soldiers will always follow, if their officers will lead. In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness; and, in this comparison, our officers seem to lose what our soldiers gain. I know not any reason for supposing that the English officers are less willing than the French to lead; but it is, I think, universally allowed, that the English soldiers are more willing to follow. Our nation may boast, beyond any other people in the world, of a kind of epidemic bravery, diffused equally through all its ranks. We can shew a peasantry of heroes, and fill our armies with clowns, whose courage may vie with that of their general. There may be some pleasure in tracing the causes of this plebeian magnanimity. The qualities which commonly make an army formidable, are long habits of regularity, great exactness of discipline, and great confidence in the commander. Regularity may, in time, produce a kind of mechanical obedience to signals and commands, like that which the perverse Cartesians impute to animals; discipline may impress. such an awe upon the mind, that any danger shall be less dreaded than the danger of punishment; and confidence in the wisdom or fortune of the general, may induce the soldiers to follow him blindly to the most dangerous enterprize. What may be done by discipline and regularity, may be seen in the troops of the Russian empress, and the Prussian monarch. We find that they may be broken without confusion, and repulsed without flight. But the English troops have none of these requisites, in any eminent degree. Regularity is by no means part of their character: they are rarely exercised, and therefore shew very little dexterity in their evolutions as bodies of men, or in the manual use of their weapons as individuals; they neither are thought by others, nor by themselves, more active or exact than their enemies, and therefore derive none of their courage from such imaginary superiority. The manner in which they are dispersed in quarters over the country during times of peace, naturally produces laxity of discipline: they are very little in sight of their officers; and, when they are not engaged in the slight duty of the guard, are suffered to live every man his own way. The equality of English privileges, the impartiality of our laws, the freedom of our tenures, and the prosperity of our trade, dispose us very little to reverence of superiors. It is not to any great esteem of the officers that the English soldier is indebted for his spirit in the hour of battle; for perhaps it does not often happen that he thinks much better of his leader than of himself. The French count, who has lately published the Art of War, remarks how much soldiers are animated, when they see all their dangers shared by those who were born to be their masters, and whom they consider as beings of a different rank. The Englishman despises such motives of courage: he was |