beast they furl and unfurl their fan, and teach their lips to curl in smiles, and their bosoms exhibit such pretty instructive heavings. These personal applications, which used to be a sort of sauce-piquant for the pert epilogue, now give the standing relish to the whole play. I am afraid an actress who should omit them would not find her account in it. I am sure that the very absence of this fault in Miss Kelly, and her judicious attention to her part, with little or no reference to the spectators, is one cause why her varied excellencies, though they are beginning to be perceived, have yet found their way more slowly to the approbation of the public, than they have deserved. Two or three more such instances would reform the stage, and drive off the Glovers, the Johnstons, and the St. Legers. O! when shall we see a female part acted in the quiet, unappealing manner of Miss Pope's _Miss Candour_? When shall we get rid of the Dalilahs of the stage? III.--[BOOKS WITH ONE IDEA IN THEM] (1813) Dull poetry is to me far more oppressive than the same quantity of dullness in prose. The act of attending to the metre is perfectly painful where there is nothing to repay one in the thought. Of heavy prose I can swallow a good dose. I do not know that I was ever deterred from reading through a book which I had begun, supposing the subject to be to my mind, except Patrick's Pilgrim. The freezing, appalling, petrifying dullness of that book is quite astounding. Yet is there one lively image in the preface, which an author in the present day might comfort himself by applying to his reviewers: "If the writer of these pages shall chance to meet with any that shall only study to cavil and pick a quarrel with him, he is prepared beforehand to take no notice of it, nor to be more troubled at their incivility, than a devout hermit is at the ugly faces which the creatures who something resemble men make at him as he is walking through the deserts." An amusing catalogue might be made of books which contain but one good passage. They would be a sort of single-speech Hamiltons; if Balaam's palfry might not be thought a more apt counterpart to them. Killigrew's play of the Parson's Wedding, which in length of massy dullness exceeds many books, is remarkable for one little spark of liveliness. The languishing fine lady of the piece exclaims most characteristically, upon coming in tired with walking: "I am glad I am come home, for I am e'en as weary with this walking. For God's sake, whereabouts does the pleasure of walking lie? I swear I have often sought it till I was weary, and yet I could ne'er find it."--Charron on Wisdom, a cumbrous piece of formality, which Pope's eulogium lately betrayed me into the perusal of, has one splendid passage; page 138, (I think) English translation. It contrasts the open honours with which we invest the sword, as the means of putting man out of the world, with the concealing and retiring circumstances that