The cafe, you fee, in these inftances, is the fame as if an English landskip-painter fhould choose to decorate his fcene with an Italian fky. The Connoiffeur would fay, he had copied this particular from Titian, and not from nature. I presume then to give it for a certain note of Imitation, when the properties of one clime are given to another.

II. You will draw the fame conclufion whenever you find "The Genius of one "people given to another."

1. Plautus gives us the following true picture of the Greek manners:

-In hominum aetate multa eveniunt hujufmodi-
Irae interveniunt, redeunt rurfum in gratiam.
Verùm irae fiquae fortè eveniunt hujufmodi,
Inter eos rurfum fi reventum in gratiam.eft,
Bis tanto amici funt inter fe, quàm prius.

AMPHIT. A. 111. S. 2.

You are better acquainted with the modern Italian writers than I am; but, if ever you find any of them transferring this placability of temper into an eulogy of his countrymen, conclude without hesitation that the fentiment is taken.

2. The late Editor of Jonfon's works obferves very well the impropriety of leaving a trait of Italian manners in his Every man in his humour, when he fitted up that Play with English characters. Had the fcene been laid originally in England, and that trait been given us, it had convicted the poet of Imitation.

3: This attention to the genius of a people will fometimes fhew you, that the form of compofition, as well as particular fentiments, comes from Imitation. An instance occurs to me as I am writing. The Greeks, you know, were great haranguers. So were the antient Romans, but in a lefs degree. One is not furprized therefore that' their hiftorians abound in fet fpeeches; which, in their hands, become the finest parts of their works. But when you find modern writers indulging in this practice of fpeech-making, you may guefs from what fource the habit is derived. Would Machiavel, for inftance, as little of a scholar as they fay he was, have adorned his fine history of Florence with fo many harangues, if the claffical bias, imperceptibly

it

it may be to himself, had not hung on his

mind?

Another example is remarkable. You have fometimes wondered how it has come to pass that the moderns delight fo much in dialogue-writing, and yet that so very few have fucceeded in it. The proper anfwer to the first part of your enquiry will go fome way towards giving you fatiffaction as to the laft. The practice is not original, has no foundation in the manners of modern times. It arofe from the excellence of the Greek and Roman dialogues, which was the ufual form in which the antients chose to deliver their fentiments on any fubject.

Still another inftance comes in my way. How happened it, one may afk, that Sir PHILIP SYDNEY in his Arcadia, and afterwards SPENSER in his Fairy Queen, obferved fo unnatural, a conduct in those works; in which the ftory proceeds as it were by fnatches, and with continual interruptions? How was the good sense of those writers, fo converfant befides in the best models of antiquity, feduced into this

prepofterous method? The answer no doubt is, that they were copying the defign, or disorder rather, of ARIOSTO, the favourite poet of that time.

III. Near akin to this contrariety to the genius of a people is another mark which a careful reader will obferve "in the re"presentation of certain TENETS, different "from those which prevail in a writer's 66 country or time."

1. We seldom are able to faften an imitation with certainty on fuch a writer as Shakespeare. Sometimes we are; but never to fo much advantage as when he happens to forget himself in this refpect. When Claudio, in Measure for Measure, pleads for his life in that famous fpeech,

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This fenfible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted fpirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to refide
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed Ice;
To be imprifon'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with reftlefs violence about
The pendent world—

it is plain that these are not the fentiments which any man entertained of Death in the writer's age, or in that of the speaker. We fee in this paffage a mixture of Chriftian and Pagan ideas; all of them very fufceptible of poetical ornament, and conducive to the argument of the fcene; but fuch as Shakespeare had never dreamt of but for Virgil's Platonic hell; where, as we read,

aliae panduntur inanes
Sufpenfae ad ventos: aliis fub gurgite vafto,
Infectum eluitur fcelus, aut exuritur igni.
Virg. 1. vi.

2. A prodigiously fine paffage in Milton may furnish another example of this fort:

.

When Luft

By
unchaft looks, loofe geftures, and foul talk,
But moft by lewd and lavish act of Sin,

Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The foul grows clotted by contagion,
Imbodies, and imbrutes, till fhe quite lose
The divine property of her firft being.
Such are those thick and gloomy fhadows damp,
Oft feen in charnel vaults and fepulchres,

Ling'ring, and fitting by a new-made grave,
As loth to leave the body that it lov'd,

And