services that could now be done to mankind by any good writer would be
the bringing them back to common sense, from which the desire of shining
by extraordinary notions has seduced great numbers, to the no small
detriment of morality and of all real knowledge."

At any rate, we now find it worth while to know what the world had been
telling all his life to an enlightened, highly-educated man, who was an
active politician in the days of Walpole and of the elder Pitt, who was a
friend of Pope's and of the best writers of the day, and who in his
occasional verse added at least one line to the household words of
English literature when in his warm-hearted Prologue to Thomson's play of
_Coriolanus_, produced after its writer's death, he said of that poet
what we may say of Lord Lyttelton himself, that he gave to the world

"Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot."

H. M.




DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.


DIALOGUE I.


LORD FALKLAND--MR. HAMPDEN.