and by promoting schemes of local improvement. He was constant in his attendance at turnpike meetings, navigation trusts, and commissions of land-tax. Ware and Hertford were indebted to him for the plan of opening a spacious road between those two His treatises on the highway and parochial laws were the result of long and laudable attention to those subjects.

towns.

His verses, and his amiable character, gained him by degrees a large circle of literary acquaintance, which included Dr. Johnson, Sir William Jones, Mrs. Montague, and many other distinguished individuals; and having submitted to inoculation, in his thirty-sixth year, he was from that period more frequently in London. In his retirement he was fond of gardening; and, in amusing himself with the improvement of his grounds, had excavated a grotto in the side of a hill, which his biographer, Mr. Hoole, writing in 1785, says, was still shewn as a curiosity in that part of the country. He was twice married. His first wife was the daughter of his friend Frogley. He died at a house in Radcliff, of a putrid fever.

ODE ON HEARING THE DRUM.

I HATE that drum's discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,

To sell their liberty for charms

Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms; And when ambition's voice commands, To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.

I hate that drum's discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me it talks of ravag'd plains,
And burning towns, and ruin'd swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widows' tears, and orphans' moans;
And all that misery's hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.

ODE ON PRIVATEERING.

How custom steels the human breast
To deeds that nature's thoughts detest!
How custom consecrates to fame
What reason else would give to shame!
Fair Spring supplies the favouring gale,
The naval plunderer spreads his sail,
And ploughing wide the wat❜ry way,
Explores with anxious eyes his prey.

The man he never saw before,
The man who him no quarrel bore,
He meets, and avarice prompts the fight;
And rage enjoys the dreadful sight

VOL. V.

FF

Of decks with streaming crimson dy'd,
And wretches struggling in the tide,
Or, 'midst th' explosion's horrid glare,
Dispers'd with quivering limbs in air.

The merchant now on foreign shores
His captur'd wealth in vain deplores;
Quits his fair home, O mournful change!
For the dark prison's scanty range;
By plenty's hand so lately fed,
Depends on casual alms for bread;
And with a father's anguish torn,
Sees his poor offspring left forlorn.

And yet, such man's misjudging mind,
For all this injury to his kind,
The prosperous robber's native plain
Shall bid him welcome home again;
His name the song of every street,
His acts the theme of all we meet,
And oft the artist's skill shall place
To public view his pictur'd face!

If glory thus be earn'd, for me
My object glory ne'er shall be;
No, first in Cambria's loneliest dale
Be mine to hear the shepherd's tale!
No, first on Scotia's bleakest hill
Be mine the stubborn soil to till!
Remote from wealth, to dwell alone,
And die, to guilty praise unknown!

THE TEMPESTUOUS EVENING.

AN ODE.

THERE'S grandeur in this sounding storm,
That drives the hurrying clouds along
That on each other seem to throng,
And mix in many a varied form;
While, bursting now and then between,
The moon's dim misty orb is seen,
And casts faint glimpses on the green.

Beneath the blast the forests bend,
And thick the branchy ruin lies,
And wide the shower of foliage flies;
The lake's black waves in tumult blend,
Revolving o'er and o'er and o'er,
And foaming on the rocky shore,
Whose caverns echo to their roar.

The sight sublime enrapts my thought,
And swift along the past it strays,
And much of strange event surveys,
What history's faithful tongue has taught,
Or fancy form'd, whose plastic skill

The

page with fabled change can fill Of ill to good, or good to ill.

But can my soul the scene enjoy,

That rends another's breast with pain?

O hapless he, who, near the main,
Now sees its billowy rage destroy !
Beholds the foundering bark descend,
Nor knows, but what its fate may end
The moments of his dearest friend!

GEORGE ALEXANDER STEVENS. BORN 17-. DIED 1784.

GEORGE ALEXANDER STEVENS was born in Holborn. He was for many years a strolling player, and was afterwards engaged at Covent Garden theatre. His powers as an actor were very indifferent; and he had long lived in necessitous circumstances, when he had recourse to a plan which brought him affluence-this was, delivering his Lecture on Heads, a medley of wit and nonsense, to which no other performance than his own could give comic effect. The lecture was originally designed for Shuter; who, however, wholly failed in his delivery of it. When Stevens gave it himself, it immediately became popular; he repeated it with success in different parts of Great Britain and Ireland, and, crossing the Atlantic, found equal favour among the calvinists of Boston, and the quakers of Philadelphia. On his return to England he attempted to give novelty to the exhibition by a sup