which was coming to the very mart where genius was the traffic. With what delight did he contemplate the pleasure he should receive in taking neglected merit by the hand, and patronizing those productions which the modest timidity of their author kept from the public because he had no patron! How rejoice when he should rescue music from boorish barbarism, and reconcile it to reason and nature!—when the heart should receive no impression but through the ear; and when the sensations of the soul should fix the criterion of sound! How be charmed when theatrical painting, instead of monstrous, should be natural!
None of these desirable ends, however, was he fortunate enough to attain. He found his partners too refractory, and too much attached to their own ignorant and conceited measures to listen to him, who was but an inconsiderable member among them. Vainly did he represent that English amusements, were they thrown into a right channel, might very easily be made, with alternate and never-ending variety, to charm, expand, unbend, instruct, improve the mind; and, in short, disperse a most extensive and valuable fund of entertainment, rich, delightful, and exhilirating, as well as sensible, useful, and moral. Vainly did he shew this source,

this mine: they, poor creatures, were strangers to its value. To speak plainer, they knew of no merit which came not to them through the medium of flattery, or was not generated in their own dullness, and foisted on the town by ostensible blockheads, who estimated their works by the quantity of manual labour.
Not content with this, our hero visited several gentlemen of undoubted and undeniable genius, to whom he lamented the great want of their public exertions, and entreated the advantage of their assistance. These he found had long retired in disgust: impossible to bear the affronts and humiliations they had sustained from men to whom—though unable to judge of any thing worthy public notice—they must implicitly submit, or retire; while supercilious coxcombs in science, only by dint of cringing and patronage, were to set the pattern which the enlightened were to follow.
Not to dwell longer at present on a matter self-evident to every man of sense in the kingdom but our hero, he found, greatly to his disappointment, that if he had wished to commit to destruction every trait of real merit, he had hit upon the very way of all others to effectuate his purpose. He therefore—in imitation of those men of genius whose disgust

against managers, and pity for themselves and the degenerate age in which they lived, had been so worthily excited—soon determined