oloured.
But there is a personal charm in the character he has assumed in his
periodical Miscellanies, which is felt with such a gentle force, that
we scarce advert to it. He has painted forth his little humours, his
individual feelings, and eternised himself to his readers. Johnson and
Hawkesworth we receive with respect, and we dismiss with awe; we come from
their writings as from public lectures, and from Addison's as from private
conversations. Montaigne preferred those of the ancients, who appear to
write under a conviction of what they said; the eloquent Cicero declaims
but coldly on liberty, while in the impetuous Brutus may be perceived a
man who is resolved to purchase it with his life. We know little of
Plutarch; yet a spirit of honesty and persuasion in his works expresses a
philosophical character capable of imitating, as well as admiring, the
virtues he records.

Sterne perhaps derives a portion of his celebrity from the same influence;
he interests us in his minutest motions, for he tells us all he feels.
Richardson was sensible of the power with which these minute strokes of
description enter the heart, and which are so many fastenings to which the
imagination clings. He says, "If I give speeches and conversations, I
ought to give them justly; for the humours and characters of persons
cannot be known, unless I repeat _what_ they say, and their _manner_ of
saying." I confess I am infinitely pleased when Sir William Temple
acquaints us with the size of his orange-trees, and with the flavour of
his peaches and grapes, confessed by Frenchmen to equal those of France;
with his having had the honour to naturalise in this country four kinds of
grapes, with his liberal distribution of them, because "he ever thought
all things of this kind the commoner they are the better." In a word, with
his passionate attachment to his garden, where he desired his heart to be
buried, of his desire to escape from great employments, and having passed
five years without going to town, where, by the way, "he had a large house
always ready to receive him." Dryden has interspersed many of these little
particulars in his prosaic compositions, and I think that his character
and dispositions may be more correctly acquired by uniting these scattered
notices, than by any biographical account which can now be given of this
man of genius.

From this agreeable mode of writing, a species of compositions may be
discriminated, which seems abov