ous to see this northern warrior; he never moved but in a crowd. The presents which he received from the proprietor of the Repository were precursors of his good fortune. His Royal Highness the Prince Regent sent for him to CarltonHouse, and presented him with a handsome sabre suspended by a black velvet belt, brilliantly embroidered with silver, and a cartouch-box of the same metal. The old soldier was overwhelmed with gratitude at the condescension of his Royal Highness, who was pleased to place the belt upon him with his own hands. He received many valuable presents from various persons; among the rest, a pike, of a very curious construction, which was manufactured at Birmingham; it was eleven feet in length, shut up in the manner of a telescope, and was made of brass. THE MODERN SPECTATOR. I for a genius ought to pass, Though the world tells me I'm an ass. ΑΝΟΝ. them, but for their obstinacy in persisting to proceed where success appears to be hopeless. But this too may admit of alleviating circumstances. Their particular friends may be either ignorant or insincere; and the world in general is too indifferent, to tell them to their faces what they may say be WHAT we call a genius, says Mr. Pope, is hard to be distinguished by a man himself from a strong inclination; and if his genius be ever so great, he cannot at first discover it any other way, than by yielding to that prevalent propensity, which renders him the more liable to be mistaken. The only method he has, is to make an ex-hind their backs. Sooner or later, perimental exertion of his faculties, and appeal to the judgment of others; now if he happens to write or to paint, or compose or act ill, which are certainly no sins in themselves, he is immediately made an object of ridicule. I cannot, however, but wish, that mankind in general should have the humanity to reflect, that even the worst performers, in whatever way their inferior endeavours may be employed, deserve something at our hands from their solicitude to please us. We have no cause to quarrel with however, experience, by its repeated suggestions, convinces them of the truth; but this seldom happens till they have wasted so much of their time, or formed such habits, as to bear very heavily on the future part of their lives, and clog, if not altogether darken, their future prospects. A letter which I have received, and whose contents I shall present to my readers, has suggested these observations. It is written by a person in the mediocrity of station, but whose complaints, or ra ther the manner in which she states the causes of them, may instruct persons in every situation of life: those in the highest, may derive advantage from a due consideration of the subject which the good lady has communicated to me. TO THE MODERN SPECTATOR. My dear and very good Sir, was employed at an hundred aud fifty miles distance from London, in glazing the hot-houses, forcinghouses, green-houses, and melon and cucumber frames, in the garden of a very rich gentleman, I do not now recollect his name, who employed poor, dear Mr. Casement for upwards of a mouth, and the money paid as soon as the job was done. As you profess to feel so much compassion for your fellow-creatures, whatever their sorrows or disappointments may be, you will, I am sure, allow an unhappy mother to unfold to you the distress of her mind, and, by your benevolent aid, lessen, if you cannot remove, the violence of her feelings, from the erroneous conduct of a darling son, who is unhappily threatened with ruin, in which she must also be involved, from the pride of his heart, and a strange infatuation to pursue a course for which nature never intended him; and thus to turn his back upon those means of support which Providence has so kindly afforded him. I am, sir, the disconsolate widow of an honest and industrious Having got rid, therefore, of all painter and glazier; and it would my scruples and apprehensions, I be doing injustice to my poor, dear, can hardly express the delight I departed husband's memory, if I felt, when I first tied on his little did not declare, that-Heaven rest white apron. How pleased the boy his soul!-he left no means untried was! and few ladies, I believe, were to render us all comfortable, and ever prouder of their fine fol de to bring up our only son, and in- rols on going to court on a birthdeed our only child, to gain an ho- day, than he was when he was nest livelihood in his own business; thus decorated, for the first time, which was a very good one, as he with this necessary badge of his had a respectable list of custom-business. Nor shall I ever forget ers, who, from his civil deportment, the joy that appeared in my poor regular conduct, and cleverness in his art of glazing and painting in all its mechanical branches, were every day increasing. Nay, the very summer before he died, he Now, Heaven knows, I was not without a mother's yearnings, when I thought of the dangers my boy would encounter in cleaning and mending windows three stories high, and the possibility of his falling into a paved area, sticking upon the spikes of an iron railing, or contracting an incurable disorder from his poisonous contact with white lead: but there are inconveniencies in all trades, and as his || father escaped, why should not he?. Thus I made up my mind to the thing; and looked forward, at length, to his rising in the world, as other industrious men have done before him. dear husband's face, when his son brought home the first shilling he ever earned, which was for putting a small pane of glass into a window of the parish workhouse, and he at length got an order from a cousin, who kept an inn in a country town, to paint him a green man for a sign; in which, as it was for ready money, he engaged, as he expressed himself, to devote all his mind and talent. Now I cannot but own that it was a beautiful painting, which he said had an original thought, as his green man had black eyes and cherry cheeks. But, alas! Mr. Spectator, I shall have reason, I fear, to curse the Green Man as long as I live; for, in consequence of the admiration it received, from very good judges of the arts, he determined at once that he was chalked out for a higher walk in life than a painter and glazier. Man, he was used to say, came into the world like a lump of putty, which, moulded by genus, The boy feared nothing, and would laugh at my apprehensions of danger, when I used to recommend him to be careful of himself, and look about him. Indeed, he for some time kept pace, as well in industry as in cleverness, with our most anxious wishes: but he was yet young, and as his father, though a skilful painter and glazier, knew little else than his business, he suf fered the boy to be always with our foreman, who, to say the truth, knew a good deal more than his master. Indeed, I have heard my husband say, often and often, that Thomas was a very clever fellow. He could marble most admirably, imitate fancy woods, and gild in a superior taste. He could also paint letters of every kind in a delightful way; French and Latin letters as well as English ones, and orna-would find it's level. In short, sir, ments too, after the antick. At length, however, I lost poor Mr. Reuben Casement, when I was obliged to take Thomas to supply his place, and if my boy had continued to mind his business, things would have gone on very tolerably well. But Thomas was reckoned a bit of a genus, and Jackey Case-invention, and obscuro, and Heaven ment was determined to be a genus too: and here begins all the mischief; for, since this same genus has performed its operations in our shop, I have not paid the oil merchant half as much for turpentine as I used to do. Thomas could certainly paint a red cow admirably well, but Jack soon excelled him; for he not only painted red cows, but red lions, and gold pestles and mortars, and crowns and cushions, and muffins and crumpets, to the life. His ambition, however, led him to attempt the human figure; No. LV. Vol. X. he now began to disdain his father's trade; nor do I know what I should have done, if it had not been for Thomas, who assisted me in keeping things together, and preserving the business that reinained. My poor boy now talked of nothing but art, and colouring, and feeling, and knows what, for I am sure I do not. He has also bought a parcel of naked men and women, without a rag about them, and placed them in his chamber; so that my maid Susan has declared she will not go into it, to make his bed; but he says that he had rather sleep in a bed that has not been made, as it gives him such fine ideas of drapery. But this, Mr. Spectator, is not the worst of it; for he has got acquainted with some man, who lives, as I am told, in your neighbourhood, where there are a great nun E from jealousy, and that the Royal Academy, though they are always abusing one another, will join to keep down the rising talents of any one who does not belong to them. He says they treat him as they did one Mr. Barry, and, that he is determined to die like one Mr. Rembran, and then his pictures will sell, as people never encourage living merit. Alas! there was a time when my poor boy was gay as a lark, and brisk as a bee; and people would stop in the street, when he was ber of these images, as large as life; and there, as he says, he goes to study-but to study what, do you think? why, I blush to tell you It is to draw a naughty woman, who sits naked in the midst of thirty or forty young men; and this he calls a living model; a pretty model, truly, for my poor boy to copy! so, that while he learns to draw, he not only forgets his trade, but loses his morals. I, for a time, kept my thoughts to myself; for, whenever he came to, borrow a pound-note of me, he talked so loudly about his genus, and his pow-mending a three-pair of stairs winers, and the style of Mr. Ralphell, or some other gentleman, whose name I never heard of before, that he stopped my mouth: and when I desired him, as he was intimate with so many of these great men, as he called them, to recommend them as customers to the shop, I thought he would have gone into a fit with laughter. He tells me, however, that when he once is an R. A. he shall be able to provide for me, and send the shop to Tartarus. What R. A. means, or in what part of London Tartarus is, I know no more than the pope of Rome. dow, or repairing a gutter, or painting the outside of a house, to hear him sing; for he had a beautiful voice, and had got the name of the painting and glazing nightingale but now he is become quite a mope, and never is seen to smile at any thing, only when. I make an observation upon his pictures. In short, I cannot sometimes help thinking that he is a little cracked, as he talks of calling up spirits from some very deep place, God knows where; and raves about ghosts sitting upon hills and riding on clouds, as he has been informed by one Mr. Hossian, somebody who, as I understand, It is not for me to pretend to lives in the Highlands of Scotland. judge of what is fine painting; but The fact is, that poor Jack Casethis I know, that poor Jack's pic-ment has mistaken his course of tures grin and stare in such a hor-life. I have some time suspected rible way, that one is almost afraid to go up the staircase at night, where he has hung them. Besides, he empties all my drawers, and takes my clothes to make up figures like Guy-Foxes on a fifth of November, which he tells me are subjects for drapery. No one, how-colours and canvas, to putty and ever, buys his pictures, nor rewards his merit; but this, he says, is all as much; but I am now convinced of it, by a letter with which I have been favoured from Mr. Caustic, by my foreman, who had been to place some painted glass in his study windows. The gentleman advises me to call back my son, from lead, or he, will be ruined, as he has no talent for the art he pro fesses, and is only fit to paint hob-vice and example, however well. goblins for a scene in a poppet-meant, they will probably use their show, to terrify labouring people at a country fair. But all I can say to the dear boy will all be in vain; and, as he reads your Repository, which he says has a great many sensible and clever remarks on the arts, he may, perhaps, be persuaded by a gentleman of your great learning and understanding, to return to his shop, which offers a respectable maintenance. Besides, sir, if you will have the goodness to inform me, which you probably can, of the street, &c. numbers of the houses, where my son's intimate friends, Mr. Ralphell, Mr. Michael Angel, and the two Mr. Pusskins, live, I will call upon them myself; and when they know what mischief they have done to Mr. John Casement and his mother, by their ad influence, as they have turned him from a glazier into an artist, to repair the misfortune they have led him into, and turn him back again from an artist into a glazier. If, good Mr. Spectator, you will,' in the benevolence of your disposition, comply with my request, you' may save a very worthy young man from ruin, and restore comfort to the widowed heart of your most grateful, humble servant, SUSAN CASEMENT. I must beg leave to express a wish, that my correspondents, in mercy to my eyes, would be so good as to convey their sentiments in that intelligible kind of handwriting which may not require the skill of a decypherer to unravel, which I really do not possess. DESCRIPTION OF THE MONUMENT OF THE CELEBRATED GERMAN WRITER, C. M. WIELAND. To no writer of the age, perhaps, are the literature, the language, and the public taste of the Germans under such great obligations as to Wieland, whose talents have for half a century been the boast and admiration of the country which gave him birth. Few authors of any nation have written so much; but what constitutes a far more honourable distinction, still fewer have written so well. Possessing uncommon versatility of genius, Wieland was equally eminent as a poet and a prose-writer, as a moralist and a philosopher, as a translator and an author of the most brilliant originality and invention. The spirited and elegant translation of his Oberon by Mr. Sotheby, has afforded the English reader a favourable specimen of Wieland's poetical powers; but it is impossible that his merits can be fairly appreciated in this country, where so few of his numerous works have yet | found their way before the public. Wieland died, in his 80th year, in January 1813, and was interred, on the 25th of the same month, in the garden belonging to his late mansion at Osmannstädt, six miles from Weimar, now the property of M. Kühne, by the side of his beloved wife and his young friend, Sophie Brentano. Here, supremely happy in the bosom of his family, Wieland had passed several |