‘Cultivate your mind, if you happen to have one. Care greatly for books and literature. Venerate poor scholars, but don’t shout for “Wilkes and Liberty!” The one is a whoremonger, the other a flatulency. ‘If any tyrant prevents your goings out and your comings in, fill your pockets with large stones and kill him as he passes. Then go home and think no more about it. Never theorize about Revolution. Finally, pay your score at your club and your final debt to Nature generously and without casting the account too narrowly. Don’t be a prig like Sir John Hawkins, or your own enemy like Bozzy, or a Whig like Burke, or a vile wretch like Rousseau, or pretend to be an atheist like Hume, but be a good fellow, and don’t insist upon being remembered more than a month after you are dead.’ This is but the First Lesson. To compose the Second would be a more difficult task and must not be here attempted. These two volumes of Dr. Hill are endless in their variety. Johnson was gloomy enough, and many of his letters may well move you to tears, but his was ever a human gloom. The year before his death he writes to Mrs. Thrale: ‘The black dog I hope always to resist and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. The neighbourhood is impoverished. I had once Richardson and Lawrence in my reach. Mrs. Allen is dead. My house has lost Levet, a man who took interest in everything and therefore ready at conversation. Mrs. Williams is so weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is solitary--the black dog waits to share it; from breakfast to dinner he continues barking, except that Dr. Brocklesby for a little keeps him at a distance. Dinner with a sick woman you may venture to suppose not much better than solitary. After dinner, what remains but to count the clock and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect? Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this? If I were a little richer I would perhaps take some cheerful female into the house.’ It is a melancholy picture, but the ‘cheerful female’ shoots a ray of light across the gloom. Everyone should add these two volumes to his library, and if he has not a library, let him begin making one with them. RICHARD CUMBERLAND. ‘He has written comedies at which we have cried and tragedies at which we have laughed; he has composed indecent novels and religious epics; he has pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by writing his own life and the private history of his acquaintances.’ Of whom is this a portrait, and who is the limner? What are the names of the comedies and the tragedies and the novels thus highly recommended to the curious reader? These are questions, I flatter myself, wholly devoid of public interest.