GI ENGLISH OPINION produced his work, not, however, so much. to be corrected as applauded ; not so much to be counselled as flattered ; he, in return, paying usuriously in the same counterfeit coin, the honour con- ferred on him, and the benefit (lone him, by their proclamation of the beauty of his work ; his fame, perhaps, suspended on the avowed patronage of a woman whom we, in our plain language, should call infamous. He is grateful to receive his imprimatur and his crown of laurel from fair and fashionable, but impure hands ; and Paris resounds, next morn- ing, with the immortality assigned him by the decision of this coterie. All this might be very well, or at least would not be so very bad, if there were no future reckoning ; but to see old age without consolation, dreading solitude as only less terrible than death, - to con- template loss of sight as only augmenting spiritual blindness, yet to see the afflicted sufferer clinging to this miserable exist- ence, and closing a life of sin with an old
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