has accomplished with brilliant success, is wonderfully similar in its
plan and conduct to Johnson's Rasselas; insomuch, that I have heard
Johnson say, that if they had not been published so closely one after
the other that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in
vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from
the other. Though the proposition illustrated by both these works was
the same, namely, that in our present state there is more evil than
good, the intention of the writers was very different. Voltaire, I am
afraid, meant only by wanton profaneness to obtain a sportive victory
over religion, and to discredit the belief of a superintending
Providence; Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of
things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal. Rasselas,
as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as
a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon
the interesting truth, which in his Vanity of Human Wishes he had so
successfully enforced in verse.

I would ascribe to this year the following letter to a son of one of his
early friends at Lichfield, Mr. Joseph Simpson, Barrister, and authour
of a tract entitled Reflections on the Study of the Law.


'TO JOSEPH SIMPSON, ESQ.

'DEAR SIR,--Your father's inexorability not only grieves but amazes me:
he is your father; he was always accounted a wise man; nor do I remember
any thing to the disadvantage of his good-nature; but in his refusal to
assist you there is neither good-nature, fatherhood, nor wisdom. It is
the practice of good-nature to overlook faults which have already, by
the consequences, punished the delinquent. It is natural for a father to