might venture to put his head into a crown without blushing much deeper than if it were his worsted nightcap. Voltaire tells us, in his history of Charles XII. of Sweden:"Few are the princes whose actions merit a particular history. In vain have most of them been the objects of slander or flattery: small is their number whose memory is preserved, and would be yet smaller, were the good only remembered."We would propose an easy method for future historians to preserve a continuity of reigns, and yet not to bestow more upon insignificant princes than just such a mark as farmers stamp upon the backs or sides of their sheep: for instance they might have Charles, the Cuckold-Paul, the Madman-Catherine, the Concupiscent-Alexander, the Lackwit-Gustacus, the Giant-Killer-Ferdinand, the CredulousFrancis, the Forsaken-Frederic, the Foolish and Fallen-Napoleon, Nick's Friend, &c.

-By this mode, as vanity is a ruling passion, kings would behave decently for their own sakes, in order to have a somewhat more.

honorable niche in the temple of historic fame. Historians and poets have more to answer for than they are aware of.

Of this opinion, too, is Butler, himself a poet, and inferior to none.

Surely our authors are to blame,
For making some well-sounding name
A pattern fit for modern knights,
To copy out in frays and fights:

Like those that a whole street do raze
To build a palace in its place;
They never care how many others
They kill, without regard of mothers,
Or wives, or children, so they can
Make up some fierce, dead-doing man,
Composed of many ingredient valours,
Just like the manhood of nine tailors!"

HUD.

Varnishing over vice with well-turned periods, or glozing over royal crimes with falsehoods, as a cat covers up what it leaves with ashes or dust, is not their only, nor worst, though a very usual and heinous offence. They can do no service to the dead

criminal; but they injure posterity by making
princes unborn believe, that curst ambition is
thirst for glory, prodigality regal splendor,
haughtiness true majesty, their people slaves,
and the public purse their own. Kings may
take our honest words for it, that all such
writers are lying knaves, who only jest with
them, to share in preying upon their sub-
jects:

"Gross flatt'ry can alone by fools be borne,
For it implies at once disdain and scorn:
Well managed praise may still expect success,
Praise shews esteem, whene'er it shews address:
But only fools gross flattery can brook,

They love the bait, and can't suspect the hook,"

DENNIS.

Fools only expect any thing from those bubbles the praises of sycophants and poets, the tears of a woman, and the opinion of the multitude. Why? They have an interest in deceiving. But, for us, our word may be taken, because our hands are clean. Although we have laid out pounds upon kings and princes, yet not one of them ever was a cus

tomer at our shop for a penny. Perhaps the reason is, because we do not deal in flummery. The poet laureat is the court fancy-dress maker: we are contented with cutting out for the swinish multitude; who, as despised as they are, pay all the reckoning. It is, therefore, reasonable that they should see how their money goes, and protest, remonstrate, petition, or address, against any mismanage ment of it; and kings should, wise ones would, listen to them, not with others ears, but with their own, and pay attention to them too!-So will they prosper accordingly. Thus say we ourselves.

Now, without pretending to any Divine revelation, or even a vision, except that which passes over the "mind's eye" upon a retrospect of the past, we will venture a little bit of a (not prophecy) guess into what may be, and we will add to it our pledge to the public, that our skill at prescience is, at least, upon a par with that of the present My. We have seen, in France, the end

of a dynasty of absolute monarchs; and of a degenerated race of nobles, from the indignation of a long enslaved populace; we have beheld nearly the whole of the German circle of princes, as well as those of Italy, sent to grass, through the apathy of their subjects, occasioned by the weakness of their governments; we have beheld the emperor of Russia, with a retinue of courtiers, who grew sick when they found an essential difference between a court and a camp, and with a herd of boors, to whom liberty was unknown even by name; we have beheld him, we repeat, commencing his career as the defender and avenger of insulted Europe, and ending it by becoming an abject vassal, nay, an instrument of the ambition and vengeance of the tyrant. Lastly, we have endeavoured to instil somewhat of our own enthusiastic love of independence, into the Spaniards and Portuguese: but, alas! they have been so long enslaved by a branch of the same dynasty of absolute monarchs as the French, and by