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against the superfluous, nay, absurd elegance with which he was furnishing it ;-white fringed beds for school-boys, azure stained papers, with gilt. mouldings, and fine prints, framed and glazed, to be spattered over with the ink of their exercises, and broken by their robust plays! He talks much of having "built his nest in the rocks." He was certainly at liberty so to do, but not to hazard the contraction of debts he might never be able to pay, by lining with purple and fine linen, that eyrie for his eaglets.

Your friend's loss has been great indeed ;-her brother, her beloved and constant companion, the soother of her widowed years! How are such ties entwined around the heart! When they break, our peace, our cheerfulness, burst like bubbles. Youth easily blows more of those soft, shining meteors. Hope supplies the materials, and decks their forms with a thousand gay and agreeable colours. But in declining life, she no longer presents them-at least for this world.

Alas, no! Time cannot make me cease to regret my changed, my lost Honora. Few days pass away, some portion of which is not tinged with sadness, from the consciousness of her extinction. From year to year, musing on her idea, I often seem inclined to reproach the scenes she loved so well for pouring forth their vernal and summer

graces lavishly, as when her dear eyes used to glisten with the effusions of sensibility as they gazed upon them. It is then that affection sighs amidst the smiles of vegetable beauty:

"Since not for her the radiant morn returns,
Since not for her the golden summer burns."

-On my life those people you mention have made a fine return to the kindness of you and yours. Reflection presents few things so painful to an elevated and feeling mind, as the frequency of human ingratitude, by which our confidence in society is unavoidably weakened. The instances you mention excite my indignation. Some years past they would have astonished me; but since my own experience can more than parallel them, wonder is changed into a regretful sigh. But never may the most repeated proofs of this dark depravity in the human heart, petrify ours with joyless selfishness, and listless unconcern for the welfare of our fellow-creatures!

Mr Saville thanks you for the Dandelion panacea. He will resort to it on the first returning symptom of the "yellow-tinging plague," as Dr Armstrong emphatically called that sick distemper the jaundice.

I am not surprised by what you tell me of Miss

's new attachment. Your pale and peevish

nymphs are always amorous.

The snow about

their hearts resembles that of our English mountains, rather than the snows of Taurus or Mount Jura. Sun-beams from a lover's eye, seldom play in vain upon the white bosom of a prude. Adieu!

LETTER LXII.

MISS WESTON.

Lichfield, April 17, 1787.

You know Mr Saville to be a man of sense and a scholar, besides being completely master of his professional science. We have together, and more than once, read, with attention, the passage you quote from Mr Savary on the music of the Egyptians, and that of the ancient Greeks. Mr Saville affirms, that it is not only impossible to form any rational idea of this writer's meaning in those passages, but that he did not understand himself. It is certain that those languages, which are rendered harsh by being composed of a great number of consonants, are yet better adapted to musical expression than a dialect could be which

was wholly composed of vowels.-Mr Savary's idea of expressing our meaning by sounds formed of vowels chiefly, if not totally, is like that of the farmer, who, when he gave a dinner to the judge on circuit, with his council, insisted that they should eat plumb-cake to their roast-meat instead of bread.

Variety is the soul of pleasure in nature, and in all the arts. Prospects without hills; pictures with out a due proportion of shadow; music without discords, and a language without consonants, must have inevitable monotony, and prove insupportably wearying to those who have been accustomed to the great effects produced by contrast in prospects, in pictures, in music, and in language.

That influence upon the passions, which history boasts of having been produced, in former ages, by the simple melodies of which only they were possessed, was naturally, I think, accounted for in one of my late letters to you. Familiarity with excellence has a prevailing tendency to chill and blunt the sensibility of its graces, and to render the judgment coy and fastidious. Upon two people, whose taste for music was by nature perhaps equally keen, if one of them has been in the constant custom of hearing the best music, and the other has had but seldom opportunity of listening even to the most moderate, probably the

simplest air, of perhaps but indifferent merit, would have more effect upon the passions of the novice, than the sublimest air of Pergolezzi's or Handel's, upon the feelings of him whose ear had been habituated to their admirable compositions.

Every adept in the science of music knows, that it is impossible for melody alone to have produced musical effects, that could, in excellence, bear any comparison with those which she has displayed since her association, in later ages, with the mightier powers of harmony.

The English language may have too many consonants; yet who, that listens to Milton's poetry, finely read, or to Johnson's best prose, or to Handel's oratorio airs, sung with expression, will pronounce it inharmonious?

In the amoroso style, we have beautiful music from Italy; more voluptuous certainly, but not more tender, more touching, more sweet, than the pathetic songs of Handel. That truth is now pretty universally felt and acknowledged; while none dispute the immense superiority of that great master in the more energetic harmonies. Thus is it proved, that our language, though less soft than the Italian, is yet sufficiently liquid for the most melting purposes of melody and harmony.

To descend from science and its professors, to individuals and their concerns. The world judges

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