tional timidity; but in all his words, his looks, his manners, within and without the church, there looked out of a feeble frame a spirit beatified before its time.

Amidst the much that delighted me in your last. packet, not Warton's declaration, that Milton had no' ear, amazed me more than yours, that you see nothing great in Hayley's compositions; and that Mason, the sweet Claude of our science, is no poet. No poet! What is it then that thrills my veins, and fills my eyes with the tears of delight, whenever I open his volumes? I never saw Mason, never desire to see him, because I believe him to be proud and fastidious; yet not the more

"Cease I to wander where his muse may haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove-or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of her mellifluent song."

Alas! I knew that the poetic laurels strike with no enduring root till they spring from the grave of genius, conscious as I was that fame is the result of many suffrages, which slowly accumulate as time rolls on. That tardiness of accumulation, I believed to be caused by the scarcity of true poetic taste, and by the envy of contemporary rivals; but I little expected to hear a man of genius, who writes poetry very finely himself, without being a candidate for public honours in that

line, and who is, therefore, unlikely to be influenced by unworthy jealousy, to perceive such a correspondent slumbering on the sofa of ennui, and excluding the sun with its silken curtains—but, as your heart is generous, I do not despair to convince you that decisions, which have so astonished me, were the result of indolent inattention to the writings of these two first poets of the present day.

I cannot adopt your dislike to cutting off the letter e, when the elision is useful to the measure of verse; nor agree with you that Milton is remarkably merciful to that little vowel. In the exordiums of the 3d, 4th, and 5th books of the Paradise Lost, it is cut off thus:

“Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav'n!—first born,

Or of th' Eternal coeternal beam,

May I express thee unblam'd?”—Book 3.

"O! for that warning voice, which he who saw

Th' Apocalypse heard cry in Heav'n aloud !”—Book 4.

"Now morn her rosy steps in th' eastern clime Advancing, sow'd the earth with orient pearl.”—Book 5.

If Milton had considered this abbreviation as a barbarity in poetic discipline, would he have thus

exhibited it in the very van of his armies? A beautiful passage in the 4th book, has a line in which it is twice abbreviated :

"The sun

Declin'd, was hasting now, with prone career,
To th' eastern isles, and in th' ascending scale
Of Heav'n, the stars that usher evening rose."

LETTER XLIV.

THE REV. DR WARNER.

Lichfield, Oct. 25,

Ir delights me that you and Mr Hayley have the happiness of each others acquaintance. May the friendship between you be eternal! My heart glows to behold all the friends I love bound each to each in the golden chain of amity; the links of which must be indissoluble when formed by congenial ability, and by kindred worth :--yet, at this instant, is my heart smote by the sudden recollection of having seen noble hearts disunited by fatal misconstruction and character ill-under stood. This consciousness reminds me that the word generally ought to have been prefixed, to

render the proud word indissoluble more sonant to the instability of mortal natures. Leav ing axioms, then, and modestly exchanging the must for the may, let me express my fervent wish that you may always enjoy Mr Hayley's esteem and warm attachment!-Distinctions greater, in my estimation, than monarchs have it in their power to bestow, even without excepting my favourite Joseph, and his amiable brother, the Duke of Tuscany.

Every author has a right to reject alterations of his work, made by others, if they do not meet his approbation. The pains I took with the poem you brought me, the Triumphs of Benevolence, were taken solely to oblige you; and I have no mortification from seeing them rejected. I invariably felt that, after the best that could be done for it, speedy oblivion must be its portion: -the fate of every poem when there exists another, upon the same subject, of decided and infinite superiority. Nay, without such an undoing comparison, the paucity of its ideas involve "a natural alacrity at sinking."

Mr Howard's warm opposition to your plan is what I expected. As he is abroad, I hoped it might not reach his ear till after its accomplishment. Officious information has precluded that hope, and his reluctance on the subject will throw

great difficulty in your way, in the prosecution of a design, which is truly praise-worthy, let evangelic modesty oppose it as it may.

You might boldly plead one essential argument in favour of your design to him by whose virtues it was excited. The statue is not erected with a presumptuous hope to reward exertions that are above all human reward, but to bend the universal passion, the love of fame, upon its noblest object, philanthrophy.

Thank you for the translation of those pages in Boccacio, which mention the plague at Florence. The account is awful-it is terrible; but the traits of that dire calamity being there chiefly general ones, it is less interesting than the poor Sadler's history of the last great calamity in London.

"When dreadful Plague, o'er London's gasping crowds
Shook her dank wing, and steer'd her murky clouds ;
When o'er the friendless bier no rites were read,
No dirge slow chanted, and no pall outspread ;
When Death, and Night, pil'd up the naked throng,
And Silence drove their ebon cars along *."

The Sadler's history of that terrible period, may by no means vie with your translation in the ac

These lines are from a very fine manuscript poem, expected shortly to pass the press, by Dr D of Derby, 1786.-S.