"Rasselas," says sir John Hawkins, "is a specimen of our language scarcely to be paralleled; it is written in a style refined to a degree of immaculate purity, and displays the whole force of turgid eloquence." One cannot but smile at this encomium. Rasselas, is, undoubtedly, both elegant and sublime. It is a view of human life, displayed, it must be owned, in gloomy colours. The author's natural melancholy, depressed, at the time, by the approaching dissolution of his mother, darkened the picture. A tale, that should keep curiosity awake by the artifice of unexpected incidents, was not the design of a mind pregnant with better things. He, who reads the heads of the chapters, will find, that it is not a course of adventures that invites him forward, but a discussion of interesting questions; reflections on human life; the history of Imlac, the man of learning; a dissertation upon poetry; the character of a wise and happy man, who discourses, with energy, on the government of the passions, and, on a sudden, when death deprives him of his daughter, forgets all his maxims of wisdom, and the eloquence that adorned them, yielding to the stroke of affliction, with all the vehemence of the bitterest anguish. It is by pictures of life, and profound moral reflection, that expectation is engaged, and gratified throughout the work. The history of the mad astronomer, who imagines that, for five years, he possessed the regulation of the weather, and that the sun passed, from tropic to tropic, by his direction, represents, in striking colours, the sad effects of a distempered imagination. It becomes the more affecting when we recollect, that it proceeds from one who lived in fear of the same dreadful visitation; from one who says emphatically: "Of the uncertainties in our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason." The inquiry into the cause of madness, and the dangerous prevalence of imagination, till, in time, some particular train of ideas fixes the attention, and the mind recurs constantly to the favourite conception, is carried on in a strain of acute observation; but it leaves us room to think, that the author was transcribing from his own apprehensions. The discourse on the nature of the soul, gives us all that philosophy knows, not without a tincture of superstition. It is remarkable, that the vanity of human pursuits was, about the same time, the subject that employed both Johnson and Voltaire; but Candide is the work of a lively imagination; and Rasselas, with all its splendour of eloquence, exhibits a gloomy picture. It should, however, be remembered, that the world has known the weeping, as well as the laughing philosopher.