already employed by Dr Bathurst, the friend of Johnson, in the Adventures of a Halfpenny, which form the forty-third Number of the Adventurer, published 3d April, 1753, several years before Chrysal.

It is chiefly in the tone of the satire that the adventures of Chrysal differ from those of Le Sage's heroes. We have compared the latter author to Horace, and may now safely rate Charles Johnstone as a prose Juvenal. The Frenchman describes follies which excite our laughter-the Briton drags into light vices and crimes, which arouse our horror and detestation. And, as we before observed, that the scenes of Le Sage might, in a moral point of view, be improved by an infusion of more vigour and dignity of feeling, so Johnstone might have rendered his satire more poignant, without being less severe, by throwing more lights among his shades, and sparing us the grossness of some of the scenes which he reprobates. As Le Sage renders vice ludicrous, Johnstone seems to paint even folly as detestable, as well as ridiculous. His Herald and Auctioneer are among his lightest characters; but their determined roguery and greediness render them hateful even while they are comic.

It must be allowed to this caustic satirist, that the time in which he lived called for such an unsparing and uncompromising censor. A long course of national peace and prosperity had brought with these blessings their usual attendant evils-selfishness, avarice, and gross debauchery. We are not now, perhaps, more moral in our conduct than men

were fifty or sixty years since; but modern vice pays a tax to appearances, and is contented to wear a mask of decorum. A Lady H- and the Pollard Ashe, so often mentioned in Horace Walpole's Correspondence, would not certainly dare to insult decency in the public manner then tolerated; nor would our wildest debauchees venture to imitate the orgies of Medenham Abbey, painted by Johnstone in such horrible colours. Neither is this the bound of our improvement. Our public men are now under the necessity of being actuated, or at least appearing to be so, by nobler motives than their predecessors proposed to themselves. Sir Robert Walpole, who, after having governed so many years by the most open and avowed corruption, amassed for himself a more than princely fortune out of the spoils of the state, would not now be tolerated. This age would not endure the splendours of Houghton. Our late ministers and statesmen have died, almost without an exception, beggared and bankrupt; a sure sign, that if they followed the dictates of ambition, they were at least free from those of avarice: and it is plain that the path of the former may often lie parallel with that prescribed by public virtue, while the latter must always seduce its votary into the by-way of private selfishness. The general corruption of the ministers them.selves, and their undisguised fortunes, acquired by an avowed system of perquisites, carried, in our fathers' times, a corresponding spirit of greed and rapacity into every department, while, at the same time, it blinded the eyes of those who should have prevented spoliation. If those in subordinate offices

paid enormous fees to their superiors, it could only be in order to purchase the privilege for themselves of cheating the public with impunity. And in the same manner, if commissaries for the army and navy filled the purses of the commanders, they did so only that they might thereby obtain full license to exercise every sort of pillage, at the expense of the miserable privates. We were well acquainted with men of credit and character, who served in the Havannah expedition; and we have always heard them affirm, that the infamous and horrid scenes described in Chrysal, were not in the slightest degree exaggerated. That attention to the wants, that watchful guardianship of the rights and interests, of the private soldier and sailor, which in our days do honour to these services, were then totally unknown. The commanders in each department had in their eye the amassing of wealth, instead of the gathering of laurels, as the minister was determined to enrich himself, with indifference to the welfare of his country; and the elder Pitt, as well as Wolfe, were considered as characters almost above humanity, not so much for the eloquence and high talents of the one, or the military skill of the other, as because they made the honour and interest of their country their direct and principal object. They dared, to use the classical phrase, to contemn wealth-the statesman and soldier of the present day would, on the contrary, not dare to propose it to himself as an object.

The comparative improvement of our manners, as well as of our government, is owing certainly, in a great measure, to more general diffusion of

But it was

knowledge and improvement of taste. fostered by the private virtues and patriotism of the late venerated Monarch. The check which his youthful frown already put upon vice and license, is noticed in Chrysal more than once; and the disgrace of more than one minister, in the earlier part of his reign, was traced pretty distinctly to their having augmented their private fortunes, by availing themselves of their political information to speculate in the funds. The abuses in public offices have, in like manner, been restrained, the system of perquisites abolished, and all means of indirect advantage interdicted, as far as possible, to the servants of the public. In the army and navy the same salutary regulations have been adopted; and the Commander-in-Chief has proved himself the best friend to his family and country, in cutting up by the roots those infectious cankers, which gnawed our military strength, and which are so deservedly stigmatized in the caustic pages of Chrysal.

In Johnstone's time this reform had not commenced, and he might well have said, with such an ardent temper as he seems to have possessed, Difficile est satyram non scribere. He has accordingly indulged his bent to the utmost; and as most of his characters were living persons, then easily recognised, he held the mirror to nature, even when it reflects such horrible features. His language is firm and energetic-his power of personifying character striking and forcible, and the persons of his narrative move, breathe, and speak, in all the freshness of life. His sentiments are, in general, those of the bold, high-minded, and indignant censor of

a loose and corrupted age; yet it cannot be denied, that Johnstone, in his hatred and contempt for the more degenerate vices, of ingratitude, avarice, and baseness of every kind, shows but too much disposition to favour Churchill and other libertines, who thought fit to practise open looseness of manners, because they said it was better than hypocrisy. It is true, such vices may subsist along with very noble and generous qualities; but as all profligacy has its root in self-gratification and indulgence, it is always odds that the weeds rise so fast as to choke the slower and nobler crop.

The same indulgence to the usual freedoms of a town life, seems to have influenced Johnstone's dislike to the Methodists, of whose founder, Whitefield, he has drawn a most odious and a most unjust portrait. It is not the province of the Editor of a book of professed amusement, to vindicate the tenets of a sect which holds almost all amusement to be criminal; but it is necessary to do justice to every one. The peculiar tenets of the Methodists are, in many respects, narrow and illiberal-they are also enthusiastical, and, acting on minds of a certain temperament, have produced the fatal extremities of spiritual presumption, or spiritual despair. But to judge as we would desire to be judged, we must try their doctrine, not by those points in which they differ, but by those in which they agree with all other Christians; and if we find that the Methodists recommend purity of life, strictness of morals, and a regular discharge of the duties of society, are they to be branded as hypocrites because they abstain from its amusements and its