Yet, after all, the hardships of severest abstinence are less oppressive than the heart-sick anxiety of conscious debts, and the hourly dread of a prison. How can it be, that talents have been so given in vain, as that the silly love of ostentation should induce those who possess them to strew such wounding thorns upon their pillow? Heaven preserve all I love from the fatal indiscretion!

LETTER XXX.

COURT DEWES, Esq.

Lichfield, March 30, 1786.

YOUR profile is extremely like. I could not have received a more acceptable present. Several have been taken of me, but none would I suffer to be preserved, because there was not one which had ascertaining resemblance. Men and women, whose shoulders are on the large scale, appear with ten-fold their real clumsiness in these

shadowy outlines. Slenderness is essential to admit their presenting a resemblance which shall not be caricature; and surely one's feelings revolt from a caricature likeness of a friend.

I

Thank you for General Burgoyne's comedy, and for Miss More's late sprightly poems*. am, in general, sick of our modern comedies, excepting the irresistible Sheridan's; but, after his, this is one of the best I have seen. The Blandishes are a race that swarm in the noon-tide beams of high-life and wealth. Our little city has produced them; though, for the exercise of their noble talents, they are obliged to resort to the seats of the neighbouring lords, lordlings, &c. down to the next class of stateliness above their own. To these " Inferiors, horrid !—Equals, what a curse!" I have never seen the portraits of this delectable set of cringers at such full dramatic length, nor in such just and vivid colours as in General Burgoyne's comedy. Miss Alscrip appears to me to say too many really good things, and her general language is too ingeniously allusive to harmonize naturally with her absurd and stupid credulity, when Lady Emily exhibits mock airs of fashion and delicacy.

* Florio, a Poetical Tale, and the Bas bleu, or Conversation.

Florio

Miss More's poems have spirit and geniusbut contain an affected and pedantic display of knowledge and erudition, especially the Bas bleu. In the Florio, we find many brilliant passages; many just and striking observations, and some admirable portraits in satiric traits. Not Hayley himself has drawn a modern beau better. is the rival of Filligree, in the Triumphs of Temper, with sufficient difference to avert the charge of plagiarism from the female author;-but the versification in Florio is, at times, strangely inharmonious, often alliterating with the hardest consonants, and sometimes disgraced by vulgarism : instances,

And,

"For face, no mortal cou'd resist her."

"He felt not Celia's powers of face."

These face-expressions put me in mind of an awkward pedantic youth, once resident, for a little time, at Lichfield. He was asked how he liked Miss Honora Sneyd. "Almighty powers!" replied the oddity," I could not have conceived that she had half the face she has !" Honora was finely rallied about this imputed plenitude of face.

The oval elegance of its delicate and beauteous contour, made the exclamation trebly absurd. How could Miss More so apply a phrase, always expressive of effrontery? and how could so learned a lady suffer the pleonasm of the following line to escape her pen?

“With truth to mingle fables feign'd. ”

The character of Celia is pretty, but in the satirical strokes lie all the genius of the work.

As for the Bas bleu.-You have heard me sigh after the attainment of other languages with hopeless yearning; yet I had rather be ignorant of them, as I am, if I thought their acquisition would induce me to clap my wings and crow in Greek, Latin and French, through the course of a poem which ought to have been written in an unaffected and unmingled English. I am diverted with its eulogies on Garrick, Mason, and Johnson, who all three hated each other so heartily. Not very pleasantly, I trow, would the two former have sat in the presence of Old Cato, as this poem oddly terms the arrogant Johnson, surrounded by the worshipful and worshipping Blue Stocking.— Had the cynic lived to hear his Whig-title, Cato, I could fancy him saying to the fair author,

"You had better have called me the first Whig, Madam, the father of the tribe, who got kicked out of Heaven for his republican principles." To the lady president herself, I fancy the cynic would not now, were he living, be the most welcome guest, since the publication of Mr Boswell's Tour. Miss More puts him to bed to little David. Their mutual opiates are pretty powerful, else her quondam friend, Garrick, would not thank her for his companion ;--but misery, matrimony, and mortality, make strange bed-fellows.

Who is the Hortensius of this work, Burke, Fox, or Sheridan? and who the Lelius?

I thank you for your elegant prose translation of Horace's ode to Ligurinus. It convinces me that Smart was very incompetent to the task he undertook, with his "unexpected plume coming upon vanity, colour changing into a wrinkled face, and the question why the former cheeks of the youth cannot return to his present sentiments." Such strange misrendering of a poet's sense is surely most disgraceful to a scholastic pen. In my attempt to give this ode the poetic dress of our language, can you forgive a somewhat lavish expansion of the Horatian ideas?—Speak to me ingenuously concerning the manner in which you