where we find no traces of Julie, Clara, St Preux, or Wolmar. However, the wily peasants have found their account in beguiling the warm imaginations of credulous strangers, and point out, with an air of confidence, the celebrated Elysium of tender memory, and the situation of Wolmar's chateau. From Geneva we came directly hither. At Lyons we took places in the coche d'eau for Avignon, and found our trajet down the rapid Rhine very delightful, adorned as are its banks by numberless villages, vineyards, and the picturesqué ruins of ancient castles; yet the banks of the gentler Soane, between Macen and Lyons, charmed us still more, as being more various, more pastoral, and as the different parts of the landscape were more finely contrasted. The celebrated Pont St Esprit, that hangs, with such noble lightness, over the rapid Rhone, pleased us infinitely. We like Avignon, and are settled here for the winter. The provisions are good and cheap, the fruits delicious, the air pleasant, except when the sharp bize pierces to the marrow; but it purifies the air, braces the nerves, and like a skilful surgeon, cuts to cure."

And now, my dear bard, after having snatched · you to the continent by Whalleyan magic, I restore you to Eartham. Suffer me, then, to express my gratitude for the kind attention and ar

4

dent welcome with which my poetical offspring has been received in its lovely precincts; for the eritical accuracy of those observations which have strengthened their claims to the public smile, and for the generous, the discriminating approbation which has so highly gratified their parent.

"The scoff of spleen shall miss its wounding aim,
For Hayley praises, and his praise is fame."

LETTER V.

DR PERCIVAL OF MANCHESTER.

Lichfield, Feb. 17, 1785.

I thank you, Sir, with the fervour of a pleased spirit, for the ingenious pamphlet * you have sent me. The system it holds forth, and, as I think, demonstrates, has long been a favourite hypothesis of mine. Judge, then, with what pleasure I see its rational probability so benevolently, so ably asserted.

* A Tract, by Dr Percival, on the probability that conscious sensation extends through the vegetable as well as animal world.

My intimacy with your publication, the "MORAL AND LITERARY DISSERTATIONS," promising me much gratification, became established soon after I had the honour to address you last, and, contrary to the general consequence of raised expectations, it promised no more than it performed. Nothing can be more just than your general censure of the poetic violations of natural history. Yet, I confess, I think slight and skirmishing allusions to fabulous circumstances have often great beauty. Surely the philosopher should pardon them, when they happily serve the purposes of illustration and imagery. Lucretius has so elegantly, and with such an air of philosophic truth, accounted for what you tell us is an unexisting circumstance, the yellow vision of icteric patients, that a poet must be unwilling to renounce the fable as a source of allusion. Poetic taste surely welcomes it in Mr Hayley's animated couplet concerning the female poets of this country, in his EPISTLES ON EPIC POETRY,

"The bards of Britain, with unjaundic'd eyes,

Will glory to behold such rivals rise."

Nor is the fable, if fable it be, less beautifully introduced in Thomson's Spring, where he describes the passion of jealousy,

"The yellow-tinging plague Internal vision haunts."

What poet scruples to describe an elegant diminutive female by the expression, fairy-form, or to impersonize unpropitious darkness by calling it -that witch, the night? We must not be too strict with the bards in our demands for the abolition of agreeable fables. Sublime use has been frequently made, by them, of the unphilosophic and long-exploded idea, that the sun is a moving orb. "He cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course." Spenser has clothed the same mistaken idea with yet more splendour.

"And now the golden, oriental gate
Of highest heaven 'gan to open fair,

And Phœbus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,
Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair,
And hurl'd his glistering beams thro' gloomy air."

And Milton,

"Thou sun, of this great world both eye, and soul,
Acknowledge HIM thy greater.-Sound his praise
In thy eternal course, both when thou climb'st,
And when high noon hast gain'd, and when thou fall'st."

One of the most strikingly exceptionable violations of NATURAL HISTORY is committed by the

generally so very accurate Thomson, whose allusions and descriptions are almost always as faithful to truth, as they are dear to beauty. This violation is found, in a very prominent point of view, even in the beauteous exordium to his SPRING. As Mr Aikin justly observes, that poem opens at the period in which the fairest of the seasons is, in turn, repressed by the roughness of winter, and triumphant over it; but that discerning critic, who makes such a point of fidelity to nature in descriptive writing, shews his partiality to Thomson, and desire of concealing every defect of his, by not pointing out the impropriety of the veil in this vernal personification. It ought to have been composed of the springflowers, primroses, violets, hyacincths, &c. instead of those shadowing roses which, in our climate, never appear before the end of June. SUMMER might properly have been invoked to descend, "veil'd in a shower of shadowing roses;" but it is a gross anachronism to attire the SPRING in that ornament.