quainted with the ebbing and flowing of the sea; for he encouraged them by saying, that Neptune had promised to work a miracle in their favour. More than an hundred years after this, Cæsar's ignorance of the spring tides was attended with fatal consequences to many of his fhips and transports in his first expedition to Britain. When they sailed down the Indus to the ocean, the surprise of Alexander the Great and his army, at the flowing of the tide, was more natural than this tale of Scipio. The causes of the tides are not yet understood. They cannot be owing to the influence of the sun and moon, though the times of their return so nearly and so regularly correspond, that they have been long attributed to this cause. Their influence would not extend to great bodies of water only, it would act upon every thing on our globe, which is of lefs specific gravity than water.

Spain is the best situated for commerce of all the European kingdoms; and though it is too dry and hilly to be fertile, and has no navigable rivers but the Guadalquivir, and that only for sixty miles, it might of itself furnish many articles for exportation. It is nighest the islands and rich provinces of America; and it has the same advantage with respect to India. Before the discovery of the pafsage by the Cape of Good Hope to India, when the commodities of that rich country were brought to Europe by the Indus, the Oxus, the Caspian Sea, the Volga, and the Don; by the Persian gulph, the Euphrates, Palmyra, and Syria; or by the Red Sea, and Alexandria, Spain, by its position, was adVOL. xiv.

N

mirably well calculated to serve as a magazine, from whence they might have been dispersed over all the north of Europe. Venice, whose situation was much lefs favourable, and who had raised herself to importance by this trade, was sensible that her power depended upon its preservation; and soon after the voyage of Vasco de Gama, proposed to the sultan of Egypt to cut the isthmus of Suez, or to join the Red Sea to the Nile, at her own expence; but the great difficulties of the undertaking prevented it from being attempted. The great Sesostris, about 1650, and Nechos, about 610 years before Christ, failed in the enterprise. Voltaire, who never quotes authorities in his admirable general history, says, it was accomplished by one of the ancient kings of Egypt; that it was repeated by Trajan, and by the caliph Omar too.

The Mediterranean offers here a very extensive market for the produce and manufactures of both India and America; and in return, furnishes many articles fit for the American trade, either produced by the countries upon its coasts, or conveyed thither by the many large rivers that run into it from the middle of Europe. The flour that always fetches the highest price in the West India market, and the choicest wines of France, might be brought by the canal of Languedoc, the Soane, and the Rhone; the produce of the rich provinces of Germany, of Hungary, Sclavonia, Transylvania, and the northern parts of the Turkish European dominions, by the Danube; and that of the most fertile provinces of Poland and Rufsia, by the Dneister, the Bog, the Nieper, and the Don.

When Spain comes again to enjoy the blessing of a wise administration, under an enlightened government, the industry of the people will be directed into a channel the most proper for reaping the full benefit of her fortunate natural situation. W. E.

CRITICAL REMARKS ON SOME CELEBRATED ENGLISH AUTHORS.

LETTER FROM A GENTLEMAN OF LITERARY EMINENCE LATELY DECEASED, TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO HAD REQUESTED HIS ADVICE IN REGARD TO THE PROPER MODE OF CONDUCTING HIS STUDIES.

SIR,

LETTER II.

Continued from vol. xiii. p. 313.

To the Editor of the Bee.

you ano

AGREEABLE to your request, I transmit tò ther letter on the same subject with the last. I have three more by the same hand which shall be at your service if you require it. I am, Sir, your constant reader. A. J.

GIBBON is by no means a favourite author with me. His stile, which you seem to admire, appears to me the very reverse of what I should most esteem in an historian. The first requisite in historic stile is perspicuity; and in this particular no historian I ever read, not even Tacitus himself, is so defective as Gibbon. His expressions are quaint, and studiously inverted; and he is at so much pains to avoid colloquial phrases, that we find a perpetual strain to produce something new and more elevated than any

one else, that renders it often difficult to understand what he would say, even when narrating the most common occurrences. The same train of ideas seems to have influenced his mind in the choice of incidents, and in the manner of introducing them to the notice of his reader. Every thing is unnatural and inverted. Digrefsions are introduced within digrefsions, which perpetually distract the mind of the young inquirer. He feels himself introduced as it were into an inchanted palace, involved in a blaze of torch light, which, reflected in various ways from concealed mirrors, present before him all at once a multiplicity of objects with which he is entirely unacquainted; gorgeous in extreme, indeed, but moving past with such velocity that his senses are confounded. He contemplates the whole as a most brilliant magical exhibition, which is inchanting for the present; but which when gone, leaves nothing but an indistinct remembrance of gaudy objects, which he can never again recognise in the scenes of nature. No writer in any language seems to me šo improper to be put into the hands of youth as Gibbon; were it merely because this manner of writing tends to corrupt the taste, by encouraging a propensity, which is but too natural to youth to admire,-a superfluity of ornament, But when we likewise consider that he has a perpetual tendency to make indirect attacks upon religion, which ought not to be introduced in this light manner into historical compositions, as well as to introduce philosophical disquisitions, which can neither be in this manner explained nor understood; his history, therefore, appears to me to be a work highly exceptionable; and for young and

uninformed minds, exceedingly improper. It gives them a slight smattering of many things that they cannot thoroughly understand; makes them petulant and assuming, and ever upon the catch to display the brilliancy of their talents, than which nothing can be more disgusting.

STUART Gilbert, like most of those who have gone before, possessed talents of no ordinary sort; but, like them also, his writings have great defects which detract much from their merit. As an historian no reliance can be had upon him. The violence of his prejudices against living authors led him perpetually astray. The object with him seems rather to have been to prove that those he disliked had gone wrong, than to be right himself; and the quicknefs of his talents enabled him to do this with a wondrous degree of facility. As his knowledge of mankind too, was chiefly confined to those of the most difsolute clafs, his ideas were grofs, and often exprefsed with little delicacy. His stile is therefore characterised, when he wrote, without affectation, as being nervous rather than elegant; but in the last pieces he wrote, it was affected, and unnatural in the extreme, and so full of Gallicisms, that it may be called Frenchified English. It was a wretched model to copy; but having seen Johnson and Gibbon, each attain a high degree of celebrity, by adopting a stile equally unnatural and barbarous, he seems to have aimed at obtaining fame in the same way. As far as his influence goes, I therefore consider one of the corruptors of good taste in ERglish composition, and of course unfit to be put into the hands of youth, fhould there be no other ob

him as