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Now all this discourse of dying, Madam, is but to let you know how dangerous a thing it is to be long from London, especially in a place which is concluded out of the world. If you are not to be frighted hither, I hope you are to be persuaded; and if good sermons, or good plays, new braveries, or fresh wit, revels, Madam, masks that are to be, have any rhetoric about them, here they are, I assure you, in perfection; without asking leave of the provinces beyond seas, or the assent of write not this, that you should think I value these pleasures above those of Milcot: for I must here protest, I prefer the single tabor and pipe in the great hall, far above them: and were there no more belonging to a journey than riding so many miles (would my affairs conspire with my desires) your Ladyship should find there, not at the bottom of a letter,

Madam,

TO A LADY.

Your humble servant.

I

[Written probably after the Scottish business, or perhaps after the encounter with Sir John Digby, which was supposed by some to have originated in a quarrel at the gaming-table.]

MADAM,-But that I know your goodness is not mercenary, and that you receive thanks, either with as much trouble as men ill news, or with as much wonder as virgins unexpected love, this letter should be full of them. A strange proud return you may think I make you, Madam, when I tell you, it is not from everybody I would be thus obliged; and that if I thought you did me not these favours because you love me, I should not love you because you do me these favours. This is not language for one in affliction, I confess, and upon whom it may be at this present a cloud is breaking; but finding not within myself I have deserved that storm, I will not make it greater by apprehending it.

After all, lest, Madam, you should think I take your favours as tribute, to my great grief I here declare that the services I shall be able to render you will be no longer presents, but payments of debts, since I can do nothing for you hereafter, which I was not obliged to do before.

Madam, your most humble and faithful servant.

TO A LADY, WHO SENT HIM A BLUSH.
[Perhaps the blush was the rose, called the Maiden's Blush.]

SINCE you can breathe no one desire that was not mine before it was yours or full as soon (for hearts united never knew divided wishes) I must chide you, dear Princess, not thank you, for your present; and (if at least I knew how) be angry with you for sending him a blush, who needs must blush because you sent him one. If you are conscious of much, what am I then? who guilty am of all you can pretend to, and something more-unworthiness. But why shou'd you at all (heart of my heart) disturb the happiness you have so newly given me? or make * Quoted in the Tatler.

equally impossible. My dear Princess, there neeas no new approac where the breach is made already: nor must you ever ask any where of your fair self, for any thing that shall concern

Your humble servant

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

C. W. E. writes to us, as a Companion should. We have not yet looked at Dream, having been, in fact, hardly able to write these notices to Corresponde owing to a fit of illness. The vicious late hours into which our theatrical critici have brought us, are new to our habits of late years; and, coming upon a stat health that has been a good deal tried, have given us a shaking.

Our friend Horatio need not have apologised for his youth. It is a fault (as old ladies say) that will mend every day; and besides, as we are not among th who think that men are apt to grow wiser as they grow older, there are few thi more interesting to us than the approbation of an intelligent youth in the bloom his enthusiasm. May our friend be as wise at forty as he is at twenty; and out all sorts of good things, where others may have no such eyesight. No matte he makes a good deal of what he sees. If all the world had the same faculty, w a brave globe we should make of it!—The passage about Mr Kean we shall h pleasure in extracting another time.

Gilbertus will be kind enough to take for his answer the one addressed to S. T. in the wrapper of the first Monthly Part.

Passages have been handed to us from the Belfast Northern Whig, the Taun Courier, and the Kent Herald, expressing their approbation of our little work, a giving a personal value to their good word by the cordiality of it. It is as if th had drank so many glasses of wine with us. Our Irish friend was the m welcome, inasmuch as we sometimes fancy, that what he may see to like in us partly owing to certain Irish blood that we have in our veins.

Our Correspondent who asks us if we are "enamoured of Madame Pasta," be answered by a confession we had made to that effect in our present number. is a very innocent love; and such as we are apt to entertain for every face we me that has truth in it.

LONDON:

Published by HUNT and CLARKE, York street, Covent garden: and sold by Booksellers and Newsvenders in town and country.-Price 4d.

PRINTED BY C. H. REYNELL, BROAD STREET, GOLDEN SQUARE.

THE COMPANION.

No. X. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1828.

"Something alone yet not alone; to be wished, and only to be found, in a friend." SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE,

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REMARKS SUGGESTED BY THE PERUSAL OF · HAZLITT'S "PLAIN SPEAKER: OPINIONS ON BOOKS, MEN, AND THINGS."

[We had not intended to devote the whole of our present number to a review. We prefer occupying some portion of our work at all times with subjects of more immediate interest. But to genuine readers Mr Hazlitt is always welcome, for he sets them thinking; and illness must be our excuse with less thoughtful ones, for drawing upon some reflections which he occasioned us a year ago by the perusal of these masterly essays. The same reason must excuse us this week to our correspondents.]

Mr Burke. We have as great a regard for celebrated names, and the sanction of posterity, as our author can desire; but he does not scruple to make short work with the pretensions of Mr Fox; and for our parts we cannot but think that he over-rates Mr Burke. Nobody doubts that Burke was an extraordinary man; but we suspect that the impatience of the House of Commons under his long rhetorical speeches did not arise so much from his talking too well and too deeply, as from a doubt of his sincerity and the dislike of his attempting to lord it over them by false

VOL. I.

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pretensions. At least, if this is paying too great a compliment to the House, it is the impression made upon ourselves by Mr Burke's writings, and by the writings of his panegyrists,-Mr Prior's late biography of him included! Mr Hazlitt speaks of himself as an impartial critic of Burke, because he differs from him in opinion; but we doubt whether at bottom he has any great faith in the sincerity of Burke's opinions, and whether, above all, he does not feel a great point of contact with him in the fact of his being eminently an author, and caring for power and effect above every thing else. Mr Hazlitt sees Mr Burke making a great sensation in his time, somehow or other, whether in the House or out of the House, upon the sole strength of his willing to do it, and pressing every trick and vantage of authorship into the service, even to the imitation of the love of truth; and he rejoices in seeing the writer getting the better of Lords and Commoners and critics, and mourns with him when his right hand is not borne out in its cunning. We do not say this in depreciation of Mr Hazlitt's own love of truth, of which we conceive him to have a much greater and more radical portion than the converted Reformer of the King's kitchen. But we suspect even Mr Hazlitt's love of power to be more on a par with his love of truth than he may chuse to discover; and whatever there is of impartial in his adoration of Mr Burke, we can more easily lay to the account of that illustrious person's address, than to anything else. But this was little, personally speaking, compared with the effect of his authorship. We cannot agree with Mr Hazlitt in the instances he has brought forward of Mr Burke's nice tact of truth in bringing together incongruous images, and making them bear upon the question, as in the case of Windsor Castle and the "fat Bedford level," the lord and the leviathan, and Louis the XVIth's head and that of Death in Milton. We are aware of the sympathies to be found in remote ideas, and the wit and the fine wisdom thence to be deduced; but we do not think, in these instances, at all events, that Mr Burke has done it; and we think he fails, partly because he substitutes the love of power for that of truth, and partly because he has a real reverence for those very sophistications and petty lordly authorities which we are called upon, in his pages, at once to think great and little.

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If Mr Hazlitt's taste were in its usual state of independence, when contemplating this wielder of sentences, he would ask the question which he instinctively puts into the mouths of readers in general, who might demand, he says, what connexion there is "between a Peer of the Realm and that sea-beast,' of those

Created hugest that swim the ocean stream ?'"

It is a burlesque in all but sophisticate eyes. There can be no such " enormous creature of the crown," when you come to bring the petty and the universal together in this manner, any more than a pin's head can contain an ocean. So of the likeness which Mr Burke (who was no more of a poet than orators are accustomed to be) was pleased to institute between Louis the XVIth's head, when he was king in form and appearance only, and the shadowy terror in Milton.

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"What seem'd his head,

The likeness of a kingly crown had on."

"The person who heard him make the speech," says Mr Hazlitt,

said, that if ever a poet's language had been finely applied by an ́ orator to express his thoughts and make out his purpose, it was in this instance. The passage, I believe, is not in his reported speeches; and I should think, in all likelihood, it fell still-born' from his lips; while one of Mr Canning's well-thumbed quotations out of Virgil would electrify the Treasury Benches, and be echoed".... [We cannot finish this passage, having lent somebody the volume that contains what we had but partly copied.]

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Now we have nothing to say for "the well-thumbed quotations out of Virgil;" but Mr Burke's quotation, if less trite, is hardly less obvious; and there is a ludicrous incompatibility between poor Louis's head and that of the mighty shade of the poet. All the interest of the monarch's position will not bring two such images together with safety. The quotation becomes a sort of pun; and we will venture to say, would have been thought of and rejected. by fifty persons. The mere will to make out the highest possible. case, does not of necessity make it, though Mr Burke too often thought so, and Mr Hazlitt is inclined to follow him. The passion recoils on the speaker, and leaves his will and his self-love upon his hands. Mr Burke, on one occasion, rushed out of the House

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