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, 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, ODE ON PRIVATEERING. How custom steels the human breast The man he never saw before, VOL. V. FF Of decks with streaming crimson dy'd, The merchant now on foreign shores And yet, such man's misjudging mind, If glory thus be earn'd, for me THE TEMPESTUOUS EVENING. AN ODE. THERE'S grandeur in this sounding storm, Beneath the blast the forests bend, The sight sublime enrapts my thought, 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, 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 |