As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr. Liston’s face. That alone is praise enough for it. Poor Goldsmith! how happy he has made others! how unhappy he was in himself! He never had the pleasure of reading his own works! He had only the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation of being harassed to death with his own! He is the most amusing and interesting person, in one of the most amusing and interesting books in the world, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. His peach-coloured coat shall always bloom in Boswell’s writings, and his fame survive in his own!—His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation: he could do nothing without some model before him, and he could copy nothing that he did not adorn with the graces of his own mind. Almost all the latter part of the Vicar of Wakefield, and a great deal of the former, is taken from Joseph Andrews; but the circumstances I have mentioned above are not. The finest things he has left behind him in verse are his character of a country school-master, and that prophetic description of Burke in the Retaliation. His moral Essays in the Citizen of the World, are as agreeable chit-chat as can be conveyed in the form of didactic discourses. Warton was a poet and a scholar, studious with ease, learned without affectation. He had a happiness which some have been prouder of than he, who deserved it less—he was poet-laureat. ‘And that green wreath which decks the bard when dead, That laurel garland crown’d his living head.’ But he bore his honours meekly, and performed his half-yearly task regularly. I should not have mentioned him for this distinction alone (the highest which a poet can receive from the state), but for another circumstance; I mean his being the author of some of the finest sonnets in the language—at least so they appear to me; and as this species of composition has the necessary advantage of being short (though it is also sometimes both ‘tedious and brief’), I will here repeat two or three of them, as treating pleasing subjects in a pleasing and philosophical way. _Written in a blank leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon_ ‘Deem not, devoid of elegance, the sage, By Fancy’s genuine feelings unbeguil’d, Of painful pedantry the poring child; Who turns of these proud domes the historic page, Now sunk by Time, and Henry’s fiercer rage. Think’st thou the warbling Muses never smil’d On his lone hours? Ingenuous views engage His thoughts, on themes unclassic falsely styl’d, Intent. While cloister’d piety displays Her mouldering roll, the piercing eye explores New manners, and the pomp of elder days, Whence culls the pensive bard his pictur’d stores. Not rough nor barren are the winding ways Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers.’