PETRARCH'S PRECISION.

THIS celebrated Italian Poet is wonderfully accurate and precise about his Laura. These are his own words:" Laura, illustrious by the virtues she possessed, and celebrated, during many years, by my verses, appeared to my eyes, for the first time, on the 6th day of April, in the year 1327, at Avignon, in the Church of Saint Clare, at six o'clock in the morning. I was then in my early youth. In the same town, on the same day, and at the same hour, in the year 1348, this light, this sun, withdrew from the world."

METASTASIO.

METASTASIO was a successful author, for he lived to see the seventieth edition of his works.

Being a character so singular, we cannot avoid extracting a notice of him from Mrs. Piozzi, who seems to have had it from the best authorities, viz. from the family in which he lived, the Mesdemoiselles de Martinas, at Vienna, at least sixty-five years.

"Metastasio's peculiarities were these: that

he had constantly lived half a century at Vienna, without ever wishing to learn its language; that he had never given more than five guineas, in all that time, to the poor; that he always sat in the same seat at church, but never paid for it, and that nobody dared ask him for the trifling sum; that he was grateful and beneficent to the friends who began by being his protectors, leaving them every thing. He never changed the fashion of his wig, the cut or colour of his coat: his life was arranged with such methodical exactness, that he rose, studied, chatted, slept, and dined at the same hours, for fifty years together, enjoying health and good spirits, which were never ruffled, excepting when the word death was mentioned before him; no one was ever permitted to mention that; and even if any one named the small-pox before him, he would see that person no more. No solicitation had ever prevailed on him to dine from home, nor had his nearest intimates ever seen him eat more than a biscuit with his lemonade; every meal being performed with mysterious privacy to the last. He took great delight in hearing the lady he lived with sing his songs: this was' visible to every one. An Italian Abbot once

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M

said, comically enough, Oh, he looked like a man in the state of beatification always, when Mademoiselle de Martinas accompanied his verses with her fine voice and brilliant finger.'

"The father of Metastasio was a goldsmith, at Rome, but his son had so devoted himself to the family he lived with, that he refused to hear, and took pains not to know, whether he had, in his latter days, any one relation left in the world.”

Poor Metastasio should have been corporeally immortal, in the way Mr. Godwin prophesies we shall be some day, as well as poetically so;such was his hatred of the grim all-subduing tyrant-Death.

DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.

THE influence of scenery over the mind and heart of Drummond of Hawthornden, constituted one of the principal charms of his life, after the death of the accomplished Miss Cunningham. His retirement to Hawthornden was the renewal of happiness. There, in the meridian of life, Drummond tasted the hours of enjoyment, which had been denied to his youth. Thither Johnson travelled, to enjoy the pleasures of his conversation; and there, with attention,

he perused the best of the Greek, Roman, and Italian authors; charming the peaceful hours in playing upon his lute favourite Scottish and Italian airs; and many an hour was by him de voted to the fascinating movements of chess.

The loss of Miss Cunningham, in his youth, increased that habitual melancholy to which he was constitutionally disposed, and gave rise to many of those sonnets, the sweetness and tenderness of which-possessing all the Doric elegancies of "Comus". for mellowness of feeling and tender elevation of sentiment, may vie with some of the best Grecian models.

How beautiful is the " Sonnet to his Lute"and the one so well imitated from a passage in Guarini's "Il Pastor Fido!"

"Sweet Spring! thou com'st with all thy goodly train,
Thy head in flames, thy mantle bright with flowers,
The zephyrs curl the green locks of the plain,
The clouds for joy in pearls weep down the showers.

-Sweet Spring!-thou com'st-but ah! my pleasant
hours,

And happy days, with thee come not again;

The sad memorials only of my pain,

Do with thee come, which turn my sweets to sours:

Thou art the same, which still thou wert before,

Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair;

But she, whose breath embalm'd the wholesome air,

Is gone; nor gold, nor gems, can her restore :

Neglected virtue, seasons go and come,
When thine, forgot, lie closed in a tomb!-"

VERSES WRITTEN BY A MANIAC.

A GARDENER, much afflicted with melancholy and hypochondriacal symptoms, was, at his own request, some years ago, admitted into that excellent asylum, "The Retreat"-an institution near York for insane persons of the Society of Friends; and gave the following account of himself, almost verbatim :

"I have no soul; I have neither heart, liver, nor lungs; nor any thing at all in my body, nor a drop of blood in my veins. My bones are all burnt to a cinder; have no brain; and my head is sometimes as hard as iron, and sometimes as soft as a pudding."

A fellow-patient, also an hypochondriac, amused himself in turning into verse this affectingly ludicrous description, in the following lines: