of them begins thus :-" It is midnight; I am alone, and in no disposition to slumber. How shall I employ this waste hour of darkness and vacuity?"

Alas! for the story is true; how did that unhappy woman employ nine waste years of darkness and vacuity? When, in 1764, Mr Porter came over from Italy to marry my lovely sister, he told us that singular and almost incredible circumstance, of a woman of fashion, in that country, having then been just discovered and rescued from a nine years confinement in a subterraneous dungeon, into which no ray of light had, in the long long interval, ever penetrated. But he did not, like Madam Genlis, represent her innocent, though, with great horror and compassion, he instanced that dire revenge, as a consequence of Italian jealousy, which had not reconciled itself to the cicesbeo privileges.

I hope you will find Shrewsbury a prosperous, as certainly it is a pleasant residence.

"Admired Salopia! that, with venial pride,
View'st thy fair form in Severn's lucid wave,"

Be thou auspicious to the health, the interest, and the fame of my friends!

Mr Saville desires his best remembrances to you and the Doctor, whose botanic enthusiasm

he shares.

The botanists all love each other the better for the knowledge and vegetable treasures

that each possess.

Ah! why do not the bards thus also? Envy throws not brands into the conservatory-Why will she so often throw them upon the lyre?

LETTER XXXVI.

TO GEORGE HARDINGE*, Esq.

Lichfield, Sept. 10, 1786.

"IF Miss Seward remembers Mr Hardinge!" Ah! dull of spirit, if the traces of those few hours, in which she was honoured with his conversation, had faded in her memory!

On their first meeting, he was so good, at Mr Boothby's request, to read a few passages from the Paradise Lost, as he sat on the window of her dressing-room. Poetry was then poetry indeed." The ear of her imagination has often brought back his cadences. Born an enthusiast,

*

Nephew to Lord Cambden, and Attorney-General to the

Queen.

LETTER XXXIV.

TO MISS WESTON.

Lichfield, July 20, 1786.

YES, truly, dear Sophia, our public critics are curious deciders upon poetic claims. Smiled you not to see the reviewer of verse, in a late Gentleman's Magazine, gravely pronouncing, "that it is trifling praise for Mrs Smith's sonnets to pronounce them superior to Shakespeare's and Milton's? O! rare panegyrist! Such praise may vie, as an offering at the shrine of dulness, with the censure which the Monthly Review passed on Jephson's noble tragedy, the Count of Narbonne, and with that fulminated in the Critical one against the first fair blooms of Mr Stevens's poetic talents, his charming poem, Retirement. Thus it is that the extremes of unfeeling censure, and of hyperbolic encomium, meet in one sickening point of absurdity.

" "Tis such the goddess hears with special grace,
While veils of fogs dilate her awful face."

You say Mrs Smith's sonnets are pretty ;—so say I; -pretty is the proper word; pretty tuneful centos from our various poets, without any thing original. All the lines that are not the lines of others are weak and unimpressive; and these hedge-flowers to be preferred, by a critical dictator, to the roses and amaranths of the two first poets the world has produced!!!-It makes one sick.

The allegory in this lady's Origin of Flattery, is to me wholly incomprehensible :-Why Venus should take the helmet of Mars, for a vessel in which to make the oil of flattery, I cannot understand. You will find all that is tolerable in this poem taken from Hesiod's rise of Woman, translated by Parnel.

Much, indeed very much, above every thing Mrs Smith has published, are the poems of Helen Williams. We trace in them true sensibility of heart, and the genuine fires of an exalted imagination. Who would not forgive to their sparkling effervescence the occasional want of metaphoric accuracy, with all the other juvenile errors of a judgment as yet unripened by time?

Ere I quit the critical theme, permit me to inveigh against the present senseless custom of excluding all capitals except at the beginning of sentences, and to actual proper names. Such exclusion is of serious bad consequence to poetry,

I mean to the general taste for it, by rendering it more difficult to be understood by the common reader. Capitals to every substantive are cumbrously intrusive upon the eye, but surely to whatever is impersonized, to whatever. acts, a capital letter is as necessary as to a proper name. When abstracted qualities are clothed and embodied by fancy, common sense revolts at their sneaking appearance with a little letter. If we say, "We feel pleasure in contemplating the lovely scene," it is proper to write pleasure with a small letter; but if we say, "Pleasure shed all her lustre over the scene," the word requires a large one as much as any other proper name. It was said to a public singer, who sung an energetic song of Handel's too tamely, "Zounds, Sir, you spell God with a little g."

You will find, in the Gentleman's Magazine for June last, a pretty poem of my father's. It contains little sketches of his own local vicissitudes, and of the characters of his brother Canons, then of this cathedral. I had forgotten it, not having seen its face these twenty years, nor knew I that a copy was extant. We have no guess by what means it crept into that publication, but I am glad it is preserved.