In Grandison, you have endeavoured to give an example of universal goodness and benevolence. But I am afraid you have strained and stretched that character too far; you have furnished him with too great a variety of accomplishments, some of them destructive, at least not so consistent with the principal and most shining virtue. _The man is every thing_, as Lucy or Harriet says; which no man ever was, or will be. Homer in the Odyssey, and in the character of Euemæus, has given an example of universal benevolence; but then he represents him an entire rustic, living constantly in the country, shunning all public concourse of men, the court especially, and never going thither, but when obliged to supply the riotous luxury and extravagance of the suitors. Mr. Fielding has imitated these circumstances, as far as was consistent with our manners, in the character of Allworthy, and has with admirable judgment denied him an university education, made him a great lover of retirement, seldom absent from his country seat, never at the metropolis but when called by business, and constantly leaving it, when that was over. The ingenious authoress of David Simple, perhaps the best moral romance that we have, in which there is not one loose expression, one impure, one unchaste idea; from the perusal of which, no man can rise unimproved, has represented, her hero, a character likewise of universal benevolence, agreeably to the part he was to act; of tender years, quite unimproved by education, unexperienced, and ignorant of the ways of the world. Should we now consider the matter a little deeply, we shall find a reason in nature for the practice of these just painters of men and manners. A human creature, in a simple unimproved state, is naturally generous and benevolent; but when he comes abroad into the world, and observes the universal depravity of morals, and the narrow selfishness that every where prevail, according to his particular temper or circumstances, he is either contaminated by the example, or contracts a misanthropical disposition, and hates or despises the greatest part of his species. There may be, and no doubt there are, men who have seen the world, who have been conversant, even in courts, during their whole lives, who yet have retained and exercised humane and benevolent dispositions; but such characters are very rare, and, for the reasons above specified, never can be poetically probable. Such, Sir, is your Grandison; he seems never to have enjoyed retirement, to have been abroad almost all his life-time, to have seen all the courts in Europe, and been conversant, with the great, rich, and powerful, in all nations. You represent him likewise to be a man universally learned, and tell us, at the same time, in capital letters, that SIR CH. GRAN. is a CHRISTIAN; and that too, in the strictest and most bigotted sense of the word; for he refuses the woman he loves, for a difference in religious principles. This, in my humble