Yes, truly, it was a whimsical fatality that set me again to work in washing and mending the raiments of P.'s muse, by bringing the ardent and honest Dr Warner to Lichfield, with that same odd work, the Triumphs of Benevolence, in his hand; the author unknown. Without discovering his name, he had left a channel of communication with the Doctor open, and had solicited from him and his literary friends, the correction of that rhapsody. Dr Warner, on fire in the Howard cause, was naturally partial to verses which celebrated the statue-design; yet he perceived how much they were deformed by the frequent mixture of bombast and vulgarism, by anticlimax and false metaphor. He solicited me to remove at least the most glaring of these stains. I made the attempt in his company, which I was too desirous to enjoy, to attend to the P-ean traces in that absurd composition. They could not have escaped a more sequestered examination.

Soon after Dr Warner left Lichfield, and before he knew the author of this work, I wrote to him that I suspected P. to be the writer-since, though it was in some places too good to be the work of his unassisted pen, yet that the absurdities were excessively of his species.

You will know how much I must have regretted the death of my excellent friend, Dr Knowles, whose soothing benevolence was salubrious to the spirits, as was his medical skill to the frame. His ever ingenious widow has answered my letter of condolence in an highly religious strain, and in that strong and beautiful language which, on all occasions, flows from her pen.

Lovely, sensible, and amiable Mrs Capper has followed her sweet sister, Mrs Wolferstan, to a premature grave. I have more depredations of which to inform you, committed by that pale and pitiless despot, on youthful happiness. Sunday three weeks, my father was prayed for in the Cathedral, and, as it was expressed, without hope of recovery. Mrs C. B. was at church, in the first year of her marriage, and apparently in the most florid health. The disagreeable prospect of losing, by his death, her pleasant habitation, must naturally rise before her mind, on this solemn commencement of its approach. Alas! she little thought that that day three weeks he would be recovered, and that a much narrower house would receive her insensate clay, then glowing in the strength of six-and-twenty years.

You have heard how violently her aunt and maternal friend, Mrs G., had opposed this marriage. There was little wonder that she, who

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meant her niece to be the sole heiress of her very large fortune, should oppose the connexion, especially as, superadded to the inferiority of his fortune, the too vulnerable heart of Mr C. B. had been drawn into temporary alienation, from his engagement to Miss by the power of beauty, to which that lady had no pretension. They married in June last, and Mrs G. never saw her niece afterwards, speaking, both of her and her husband, with unabating and incessant asperity. But during Mrs B.'s illness, Mrs G. was agitated and miserable ;—and, two days after the melancholy event, went, at four o'clock in the evening, to that house of death. She entered in violent agitation, and, doubtless, very real anguish. She wept over the corpse, loud and bitterly, repeatedly kissing the face, with passionate affection ;-but, strange to tell, her indignation at the family remained unquenched by those agonized tears; and she refused, with scorn, the offered hand of old Mrs B. who had been a careful and tender nurse to her daughter-in-law, through the fatal illness.

Does not this visit remind you of Miss Howe's to Harlow Place?-the struggle of wild despondent tenderness for her lost friend, with disdain of the inhabitants; though Miss Howes's continued affection for Clarissa, was a contrast to

Mrs G.'s ungoverned resentment. So much the more bitter must have been the anguish of the latter, standing by the coffin, when, like Miss Howe, with wild impatience, she pushed aside the face-cloth.

Yesterday morning, Miss Nott came to desire I would pass that evening with her. At a quarter past six, the night being fair, star-light, and frosty, I set out to walk to my appointed visit. My way was by Mr C. B.'s house. I observed the chamber of the deceased, where both the shutters were open, to be extremely light, and the shadows of several people, walking about the room, were visible on the ceiling. As I stood contemplating the awful scene, I heard the knocking of hammers, that were sodering up the coffin. The lines from Shakespeare's description of the martial field, the night before the battle of Agincourt, rushed upon my recollection :

"While, from the tents,

The armourers, accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,

Gave dreadful note of preparation."

The loud and dismal funeral-bell tolled this morning at break of dawn, and finished the mournful scene.

Adieu.

LETTER LIV.

MRS MOMPESSAN.

Lichfield, March 5, 1787.

PERFORMING my promise to you, I have attentively read over the first volume of Sully's Memoirs. Sometimes it interested me very much ; but I waded through a great deal of it fatigued, and without interest. The little pleasure which reading history generally gives me ; the slight and fading impression which its events are apt to leave upon my mind, probably results from my total want of taste for splendour, precedence, and power to influence the destiny of others. To me it seems a species of insanity, when a man, whom destiny has made a king, or a minister, sacrifices the lives of his fellow creatures, and produces all the numerous collateral miseries, parental, filial, paternal, and connubial, consequent upon every single deprivation; for what appears to me so little worth the hazard as an extension of empire, and the gewgaws of rank, even up to that troublesome bauble, the imperial sceptre. How much rather would I possess the inevitable future fame