But whatever may be thought of his creed, it must be recorded of him that he discharged some of the best duties of religion in a manner that would have become its most zealous professors. He was bountiful to the poor, and hospitable to his equals. To the inferior clergy, when he resided at Lichfield, he gave his advice unfeed, and he attended diligently to the health of those who were unable to requite him. Johnson is said, when he visited his native city, to have shunned the society of Darwin: Cowper, who certainly was as firm a believer as Johnson, thought it no disparagement to his orthodoxy, to address some complimentary verses to him on the publication of his Botanic Garden. This poem ought not to be considered more than as a capriccio, or sport of the fancy, on which he has expended much labour to little purpose. It does not pretend to anything like correctness of design, or continuity of action. It is like a picture of Breughel's, where every thing is highly coloured, and every thing out of order. In the first part, called the Economy of Vegetation, the Goddess of Botany appears with her attendants, the Powers of the Four Elements, for no other purpose than to describe to them their several functions in carrying on the operations of nature. In the second, which has no necessary connection with the first, the Botanic Muse describes the Loves of the Plants. Here the fiction is puerile, and built on a system which is itself in danger of vanishing into air. At the end of the second canto, the Muse takes a dish of tea, which I think is the only thing of any consequence that is done throughout. The second part has been charged with an immoral tendency; but Miss Seward has observed, with much truth, that it is a burlesque upon morality to make the amours of the plants responsible at its tribunal; and that the impurity is in the imagination of the reader, not in the pages of the poet. For these amours, he might have found a better motto than that which he has prefixed from Claudian, in the following stanza of Marini. Ne' fior ne' fiori istessi Amor ha loco, Ama il giglio il ligustro e l'amaranto, E Narciso e Giacinto, Ajace e Croco, E con la bella Clitia il vago Acanto; Arde la Rosa di vermiglio foco, L'odor sospiro e la rugiada e pianto: Ride la Calta, e pallida e essangue Vinta d'amor la violetta langue. _Adone_, Canto 6. He was apt to confound the odd with the grotesque, and to mistake the absurd for the fanciful. By an excellent landscape-painter now living, I was told that Darwin proposed as a subject for his pencil, a shower, in which there should be represented a red-breast holding up an expanded umbrella in its claws.