hat greater
should be inflicted. They haunted them like hideous spectres, and
continually started up before them in all their enormity. They
wished for a second death, that might separate them from these
ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits
from the body,--a death that might at once extinguish all
consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of hell
to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable
darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which,
though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth,
from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and
unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them,
like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like
lightning,--a fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the
external parts, infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth,
now an avenging flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a
furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the
first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as
it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort;
animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his
own misconduct, and the dreadful madness that results from despair.

If the "perpetual feast of nectared sweets" that the "Telemachus"
affords, is felt at times to be almost cloying, it is not, as our
readers have now seen, for want of occasional contrasts of a bitterness
sufficiently mordant and drastic. But the didactic purpose is never lost
sight of by the author. Here is an aspect of the Elysium found by
Telemachus. How could any thing be more delectably conceived and
described? The translator, Dr. Hawkesworth, is animated to an English
style that befits the sweetness of his original. The "Telemachus:"--

In this place resided all the good kings who had wisely governed
mankind from the beginning of time. They were separated from the
rest of the just; for, as wicked princes suffer more dreadful
punishment than other offenders in Tartarus, so good kings enjoy
infinitely greater felicity than other lovers of virtue, in the
fields of Elysium.

Telemachus advanced towards these kings, whom he found in groves of
delightful fragrance, reclining upon the downy turf, where the