Would you the public's envied favours gain? Ceaseless, in writing, variegate the strain; The heavy author, who the fancy calms, Seems in one tone to chant his nasal psalms. Every style is excellent, if it be proper; and that style is most proper which can best convey the intentions of the author to his reader. And, after all, it is STYLE alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style; facts, scientific discoveries, and every kind of information, may be seized by all, but an author's diction cannot be taken from him. Hence very learned writers have been neglected, while their learning has not been lost to the world, by having been given by writers with more amenity. It is therefore the duty of an author to learn to write as well as to learn to think; and this art can only be obtained by the habitual study of his sensations, and an intimate acquaintance with the intellectual faculties. These are the true prompters of those felicitous expressions which give a tone congruous to the subject, and which invest our thoughts with all the illusion, the beauty, and motion of lively perception. * * * * * GOLDSMITH AND JOHNSON. We should not censure artists and writers for their attachment to their favourite excellence. Who but an artist can value the ceaseless inquietudes of arduous perfection; can trace the remote possibilities combined in a close union; the happy arrangement and the novel variation? He not only is affected by the performance like the man of taste, but is influenced by a peculiar sensation; for while he contemplates the apparent beauties, he traces in his own mind those invisible processes by which the final beauty was accomplished. Hence arises that species of comparative criticism which one great author usually makes of his own manner with that of another great writer, and which so often causes him to be stigmatised with the most unreasonable vanity. The character of GOLDSMITH, so underrated in his own day, exemplifies this principle in the literary character. That pleasing writer, without any perversion of intellect or inflation of vanity, might have contrasted his powers with those of JOHNSON, and might, according to his own ideas, have considered himself as not inferior to his more celebrated and learned rival.