mention of Johnson's friendship for Mrs. Cobb, of whose declaration respecting her, in a room full of company here, the panegyrist had so often heard "How should," exclaimed Johnson, 66 how should Moll Cobb be a wit! Cobb has read nothing, Cobb knows nothing; and where nothing has been put into the brain, nothing can come out of it to any purpose of rational entertainment.” Somebody replied,-Then why is Dr. Johnson so often her visitor?" O! I love Cobb-I love Moll Cobb for her impudence."

The despot was right in his premises, but his conclusion was erroneous. Little as had been put into Mrs. Cobb's brain, much of shrewd biting and humorous satire was native in the soil, and has ofteu amused very superior minds to her own. Of that superiority, however, Dr. Johnson excepted, she had no consciousness; her ignorance and self-sufficience concealed it effectually. She was a very selfish character, nor knew the warmth of friendship nor the luxury of bestowing. Thus has her monumental wall been daubed by very untempered mortar indeed. Yet, to her we may apply what Henry V. says of Falstaff,

"We cou'd have better spar'd a better man;

Adio!

O! we shou'd have a heavy miss of thee,
If we were much in love with vanity."

LETTER XLVI.

ANNA SEWARD TO MISS SYKES.

Lichfield, June 30, 1795. I HAVE been impatient of this involuntary delay, in acknowledging a letter, pathetic, interesting, and kind as your last:-in assuring you of the sympathetic concern which often arises, as me. mory presents this lamented deprivation.

"O! human life, how mutable! how vain!

How thy wide sorrows circumscribe thy joys!"

Alas! the affliction I so sincerely pity, must long descend upon the tomb, where hopes like yours lie blasted. I know what I should myself have felt, had my now long-lost Honora been torn from our arms in the first bloom of her youth;-had her resembling talents and graces thus suddenly perished. I am comforted that your venerable parents waning strength, sunk not totally under the unexpected stroke. Surely your county is more subject to putrid diseases, that sweep through whole families, than ours; particularly of the throat, to which so many of the Wakefields were victims ; and by which, autumn twelvemonth, the house of Westella was so near sustaining a still heavier loss; an event which, while it must have darkened the remainder of your parents' days, would have absolved you from your share of their present woe, and precluded the melancholy sweetness of comforting them under it.

As to the tender love-tale, interwoven with your pathetic narration, you judged rightly in feeling assured that it would interest me; that I should admire the conduct of your father, and love your charming brother, for the sacrifices he is making of ambition and interest, to pity, gratitude, and affection. I cannot think these sacrifices were a duty-but so much less as they were duties, so much more are they generosity. May every happiness ensue and reward the virtue !

I am afresh obliged by the kind wishes of yourself and family, to see me amongst you this summer; by the gratifying exception in my favour, which dear Mr. Sykes makes beneath his averseness to society, out of the pale of his own numerous connexions ;-by the friendly summons of Mr. and Mrs. R. Sykes to their hospitable board; but extrinsic circumstances combine with the arbitrary demands of impaired health, to counteract those wishes that point my course to the Humber.-Coz. T. White and his bride-elect make a prodigious point of my attending them to church, and sitting with the bride to receive her company. By this event I shall be detained at home till the latter end of July, and must then go to some of those medical springs which my complaints require: else, be assured I long to see you all again; and that to mingle my sighs with yours more increases that longing than could any prospect of participated amusement.

Surely, dear Miss Sykes, you have shrunk with horror from the ten-times trebled cruelties of the Bastile, which have brought the poor dauphin to the grave, and which must soon destroy his inno

cent sister. The old government, at some seldom times, confined in the dreadful solitudes of that prison, individuals who had rendered themselves politically obnoxious-but those unhappy sufferers were kept clean, and at least allowed to sleep in peace. The unoffending royal little ones were not only condemned to languish in solitude and darkness, but their bodies left to perish by slow disease, the certain and torturing consequence of loathsome filth. From month to month, none came to smooth their bed or to give them clean linen, but their food was conveyed to them through holes in the walls, and amidst the accumulated nastiness of a never-opened cell!-their sleep disturbed every hour or two, through the comfortless night, from being obliged, at the imperious call of the brutal sentinels, to run naked to those holes, to show that neither death had delivered them from their base oppressors, nor aristocratic stratagem exchanged them for other children.

Never, never was human nature so demonized as in those vile French, authorising, under every set of democratic rulers, such unprovoked and utterly useless barbarity. While the monsters, who now hold the reins of unorganized government, were anathematizing their fellow-monsters, the fallen party, for cruelty, themselves were exerting a still more infamous degree of it, upon the sweet innocent children of their too-indulgent, their murdered king.

That such detestable and impious wretches are not permitted to be crushed, rendered a warning to other nations, and an awful example of the chastisement of an outraged deity, seems incom

prehensible; but God, in his own time, will punish these blasphemous and cruel republicans, and avenge the injured in the sight of men and angels.

As to the present measures of this country, I am sorry to say I think them as impolitic and rash as you can do. Persisting in a war originally just, but now become hopeless, we seem to forget that there is a God to punish the wicked, without our waste of blood and treasure in a desperate cause. Unwarned by the consequence of our first criminally extravagant loan to Prussia, its repetition to the emperor in times like these, with exhausted resources, and an impending famine, in my opinion, deserves and calls loudly for the impeachment of those, whose callous insensibility to the sufferings of their country, have dared to bring it forward.

"O Pitt! thou long-refulgent star,
That roll'd the nation's azure car

Through blissful climes, where olives strew'd the way,
How art thou fallen, thou sou of light,

How falleu from thy meridian height,

Who saidst, The distant lands shall hear me and obey !"

I was in hopes a fine summer would have succeeded that wild winter which so long shook forth its waste of horrors, pregnant with more than common mischiefs :-but here is the longest day past, and we are yet shivering by our fires, without having obtained scarce a week in which the biting east has not generally howled.

This is the period of inconceivable characters, as well as of unexpected and prodigious events. The modern Thalestris is now in this city, made