mediately of your instrument, and had recourse to it. I observed in what part of his discourse he most employed his fingers, and had suddenly recourse to mine, with equal emphasis and significancy. The art was not discovered, ere I had routed my antagonist; having seated myself in a dark corner, where my operations were not discernible. I observed, that as he found himself more closely pressed, he grew more and more assiduous in his application to his snuff-box, much as an otter closely pursued is forced to throw up bubbles that shew his distress. I therefore discovered gradually less and less occasion for speaking; and for thinking, none at all. I played only a flourish in answer to the argument at his finger's ends; and after a while found him as mortal in this part as in any other. When his cause was just expiring, after a very long pursuit, and many fruitless turnings and evasions in the course of it, I sounded my instrument, with as much alacrity as a huntsman does his horn on the death of a hare.

THE next whom I engaged was a more formidable disputant; and I own, with a sense of gratitude, that your instrument alone could render me a match for

him. His strength of argument was his strength of lungs; and he was, unquestionably, an able antagonist. However, if your machine put me upon a par with him, I think I may say without vanity, that in point of reason, I had the upper hand. I shall only add that as it was habitual for him to answer arguments by vociferation, so it became needless for me to give him any answer of a better kind.

THUS far my friend: I do not question but there will appear artists, that shall undertake to instruct the diffident, the submissive, and the bashful, how to perform the whole gamut of oratorical and risible music : and as there is a kind of humorous laughter, which draws all others into its own vortex, I need not here assert that I would have this branch very much inculcated.

NEITHER is this instrument of importance in dispute alone, or controversy; but wherever one man's faculties are more prone to laughter than another's. Trifles will burst one man's sides, which will not disturb the features of another; and a laugh one cannot join, is almost as irksome as a lamentation. 'Tis

like a peal rung after a wedding; where a whole parish shall be stunned with noise, because they want that occasion to rejoice, which the persons at least imagine to be their lot, that occasioned it. The sounds are pleasing to their ears, who find them conformable to their own ideas; but those who are not in temper, or unconcerned, find them a stupefying repetition.

WHEN therefore my mind is not in tune with another's, what strikes his, will not vibrate on mine. All I then have to do, is to counterfeit a laugh; which is an operation as artificial, as the machine I have been describing.

THE

THE

HISTORY OF DON PEDRO

HE actions of our lives, even those we call most important, seem as much subject to trifles as our very lives themselves. We frame many notable projects in imagination, and promise to ourselves an equal term of life. 'Tis however in the power of the minutest accident, to shorten the one, and disconcert the other. 'Tis with mankind as with certain fire-engines, whose motion may be stopped in the midst of its rapidity, by the interposition of a straw in a particular part of them.

THE following translation from the original Spanish, will sufficiently illustrate the foregoing assertion. Don Pedro was one of the principal grandees of his age and country. He had a genius equal to his birth, and a disposition remarkably contemplative. 'Twas his custom, on this account, to retire from the world at stated periods, and to indulge himself in all the mazes

of

of a fine imagination. It happened as he one day sate in his study, that he fixed his eye on a neighbouring spider. The most trivial object (if any natural object can be termed so) served him frequently for the foundation of some moral and sublime reflection. He surveyed the creature attentively, and indulged the bias of his thought, till he was lost in the excursions of a profound revery. The curious workmanship of this unregarded animal brought at once into his mind the whole art of fortification. He observed the deficiency of human skill, and that no cunning could have contrived her so proper a habitation. He found that no violence could affect the extremities of her lines, but what was immediately perceptible, and liable to alarm her at the centre. He observed the road by which she sallied forth, served to convey intelligence from without, at the same time that it added strength and stability to the work within. He was at once surprized and pleased with an object which, although common, he happened not to have beheld in the same light, or with the same attention. From this instant he bent his thoughts upon the advancement of military fortification: and he often would declare it was this trivial incident that gave him

a relish