HISTORY AND SATIRE.

The corruption of manners has been so great, as well among those who have lived in the world, as among those who have lived out of it, that the more a person endeavours to give faithful and true relations, the more he runs the hazard of composing only defamatory libels. Doubtless there is a great difference between History and Satire, but a small matter suffices to metamorphose the one into the other. If, on the one hand, you take from Satire that spirit of sharpness, that air of anger, which discovers that

passion has a greater share in the scandals reported than a love of virtue; and if you add the obligation one is under, of relating indifferently the good and the bad, it is no longer reputed Satire, but History. Let an historian, on the other hand, faithfully relate all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his work shall be reputed rather a Satire than a History, if he discover but ever so little emotion in himself at the thoughts of so many commendable facts which he exposes to public view. I do not believe that that coolness of temper, with which a judge ought to pronounce sentence against robbers and murderers, is always to be exacted from a historian. Some pointed reflections do not become him ill.—Art. Bruschius.