ng other _evils_ prevailing, observing the following
_melancholy_ but _notorious_ facts: that one who is a minister of the
church of Scotland did _himself_ write and compose _a stage-play_,
intituled, 'The tragedy of Douglas,' and got it to be acted at the
theatre of Edinburgh; and that he with several other ministers of the
church were present; and _some_ of them _oftener than once_, at the
acting of the said play before a numerous audience. The presbytery being
_deeply affected_ with this new and strange appearance, do publish these
sentiments," &c Sentiments with which I will not disgust the reader;
but which they appear not yet to have purified and corrected, as they
have shown in the case of Logan and other Scotchmen, who have committed
the crying sin of composing dramas!

CRITICAL HISTORY OF POVERTY.

M. Morin, in the Memoirs of the French Academy, has formed a little
history of Poverty, which I abridge.

The writers on the genealogies of the gods have not noticed the deity of
Poverty, though admitted as such in the pagan heaven, while she has had
temples and altars on earth. The allegorical Plato has pleasingly
narrated, that at the feast which Jupiter gave on the birth of Venus,
Poverty modestly stood at the gate of the palace to gather the fragments
of the celestial banquet; when she observed the god of riches,
inebriated with nectar, roll out of the heavenly residence, and passing
into the Olympian Gardens, throw himself on a vernal bank. She seized
this opportunity to become familiar with the god. The frolicsome deity
honoured her with his caresses; and from this amour sprung the god of
Love, who resembles his father in jollity and mirth, and his mother in
his nudity. The allegory is ingenious. The union of poverty with riches
must inevitably produce the most delightful of pleasures.

The golden age, however, had but the duration of a flower; when it
finished, Poverty began to appear. The ancestors of the human race, if
they did not meet her face to face, knew her in a partial degree; the
vagrant Cain encountered her. She was firmly established in the
patriarchal age. We hear of merchants who publicly practised the
commerce of vending slaves, which indicates the utmost degree of
poverty. She is distinctly marked by Job: this holy man protests, that
he had nothing to reproach himself with respecting the poor, for he had
assisted them in their necessities.

In the scriptures, legislators paid great