mates.

of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred cli The muff and the fan come together from the different ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, and the tippet from beneath the pole. The brocade petticoat rises out of the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace out of the bowels of Indostan.

If we consider our own country in its natural prospect, without any of the benefits and advantages of commerce, what a barren uncomfortable spot of earth falls to our share ! Natural historians tell us, that no fruit grows originally among us, besides hips and haws, acorns and pig-nuts, with other delicacies of the like nature; that our climate of itself, and without the assist. ances of art, can make no further advances towards a plumb than to a sloe, and carries an apple to no greater a perfection than a crab that our melons, our peaches, our figs, our apricots, and cherries, are strangers among us, imported in different ages, and naturalized in our English gardens; and that they would all degenerate and fall away into the trash of our own country, if they were wholly neglected by the planter, and left to the mercy of our sun and soil. Nor has traffic more enriched our vegetable world, than it has improved the whole face of nature among Our ships are laden with the harvest of every climate: our tables are stored with spices, and oils, and wines; our rooms are filled with pyramids of China, and adorned with the workmanship of Japan: our morning's draught comes to us from the remotest corners of the earth; we repair our bodies by the drugs of America, and repose ourselves under Indian canopies. My friend Sir Andrew calls the vineyards of France our gardens; the spice-islands our hot-beds: the Persians our silk-weavers,

us."

Improved the whole face of nature among us. Badly expressed: for the instances given, are not of improvements in the face of nature, but in

the accommodations of life.-H.

VOL. IV.-9*

and the Chinese our potters. Nature indeed furnishes us with the bare necessaries of life, but traffic gives us a great variety of what is useful, and at the same time supplies us with every thing that is convenient and ornamental. Nor is it the least part of this our happiness, that whilst we enjoy the remotest products of the north and south, we are free from those extremities of weather which give them birth; that our eyes are refreshed with the green fields of Britain, at the same time that our palates are feasted with fruits that rise between the tropics.

For these reasons there are not more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of nature, find work for the poor, and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.

Our English merchant converts the tin of his own country into gold, and exchanges his wood for rubies. The Mahometans are clothed in our British manufacture, and the inhabitants of the Frozen Zone warmed with the fleeces of our sheep.

When I have been upon the Change, I have often fancied one of our old kings standing in person, where he is represented in effigy, and looking down upon the wealthy concourse of people with which that place is every day filled. In this case, how would he be surprised to hear all the languages of Europe spoken in this little spot of his former dominions, and to see so many private men, who in his time would have been the vassals of some powerful baron, negociating like princes for greater sums of money than were formerly to be met with in the royal treasury! Trade, without enlarging the British territories, has given us a kind of additional empire: it has multiplied the number of the rich, made our landed estates infinitely more valuable than they were formerly, and added to them an accession of other estates as valuable as the lands themselves.

C.

No. 70. MONDAY, MAY 21.

Interdum vulgus rectum videt.

HOR. 1 Ep. 11, 63.

Sometimes the vulgar see and judge aright.

WHEN I travelled, I took a particular delight in hearing the songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed; for it is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a multitude, though they are only the rabble of a nation, which hath not in it some peculiar aptness to please and gratify the mind of man. Human nature is the same in all reasonable creatures; and whatever falls in

To praise an old ballad at the present day would hardly be considered as a remarkable proof of taste. Percy's collection, Scott's example, and the revival of medieval studies, have brought out stores of genuine poetry, which the critics of a hundred years ago had never dreamed of. But of all the papers of the Spectator there is none, perhaps, which in spite of the authority of Sidney, Dryden and Molière, required more independence than this defence of a simple and artless poem. If Addison had no other claim to the sympathy of true scholars, it would be enough to say that he was one of the first to call attention to the ancient ballad, and the first to praise Milton judiciously.

The ballad of 'Chevy Chace' is founded upon some incident in the border wars of England and Scotland, and probably upon the battle of Peppenden between the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Douglas, in 1436 (V. Collins's Peerage, v. 11, p. 334). Of the author, Rychard Sheale, whose name is preserved in an old mannscript, nothing is known; though there can be little hesitation in fixing upon the early part of the fifteenth century, as the period in which he lived. With a modification of a single word, we might apply to him the language which Bouterweck applies to an early German poet, Dem Unbekannten sichert sein Werk die Unsterblichkeit. It is of this form of the poem that Sidney speaks in the passage quoted by Addison.

Long afterwards, and probably in the reign of Elizabeth, the old poem was remodelled by another poet: and this is the version that Addison, who had never seen the original, makes the subject of his critical examination. In the notes I have introduced a few specimens of the original work. Both poems may be found in the first volume of Percy's Reliques of ancient English poetry.-G.

with it, will meet with admirers amongst readers of all qualities and conditions. Moliere, as we are told by Monsieur Boileau, used to read all his comedies to an old woman who was his housekeeper, as she sat with him at her work by the chimney-corner; and could foretell the success of his play in the theatre, from the reception it met at his fire-side: for he tells us the audience always followed the old woman, and never failed to laugh in the same place.

I know nothing which more shews the essential and inherent perfection of simplicity of thought,' above that which I call the Gothic manner in writing, than this; the first pleases all kinds of palates, and the latter only such as have formed to themselves a wrong artificial taste upon little fanciful authors and writers of epigram. Homer, Virgil, or Milton, so far as the language of their poems is understood, will please a reader of plain common sense, who would neither relish nor comprehend an epigram of Martial, or a poem of Cowley: so, on the contrary, an ordinary song or ballad, that is the delight of the common people, cannot fail to please all such readers as are not unqualified for the entertainment by their affectation or ignorance; and the reason is plain, because the same paintings of nature which recommend it to the most ordinary reader, will appear beautiful to the most refined.

The old song of Chevy-Chase is the favourite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to say, he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Discourse of Poetry, speaks of it in the following words: 'I never heard the old song of Piercy and Douglas, that I found not my heart more moved than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung by some blind Crowder with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in

See Dennis's Original Letters, Fam. Mor. and Crit. 8vo. 1721, p. 166, & seq.—Letter to Henry Cromwell, Esq. on Simplicity in Poetical Composition.-C.

the dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?' For my own part I am so professed an admirer of this antiquated song, that I shall give my reader a critic upon it, without any further apology for so doing.

The greatest modern critics have laid it down as a rule, that an heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept of morality, adapted to the constitution of the country in which the poet writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view. As Greece was a collection of many governments, who suffered very much among themselves, and gave the Persian Emperor, who was their common enemy, many advantages over them by their mutual jealousies and animosities, Homer, in order to establish among them an union, which was so necessary for their safety, grounds his poem upon the discords of the several Grecian Princes who were engaged in a confederacy against an Asiatic Prince, and the several advantages which the enemy gained by such their discords.' At the time the poem we are now treating of was written, the dissensions of the barons, who were then so many petty princes, ran very high, whether they quarrelled among themselves, or with their neighbours, and produced unspeakable calamities to the country: the poet, to deter men from such unnatural contentions, describes a bloody battle, and dreadful scene of death, occasioned by the mutual feuds which reigned in the families of an English and Scotch nobleman that he designed this for the instruction of his poem, we may learn from his four last lines, in which, after the example of the modern tragedians, he draws from it a precept for the benefit of his readers.

1

Eight different epochs are assigned to Homer, covering a space of 460 years. The whole of this theory is untenable; the moral of the epic being, as with Tasso, a pure afterthought.-G.