greatest poetic luminary, if we may judge from the brightness of its dawn, that ever rose in our, or perhaps in any other, hemisphere. This fine wit of Strawberry-hill, is of that order of mortals who swarm, always swarmed, and always will swarm, in refined states; whose eyes of admiration are in their backs, and who, consequently, see nothing worthy their attention before, or on either side of them; and who, therefore, weary, sicken, and disgust people, whose sensibilities are strong and healthy, by their eternal cant about the great have beens, and the little ares. Wit, dearly as I love it, cannot atone to me for such envious, such hackneyed nonsense, from age to age transmitted. Shaftesbury canted in this style during that very period which the back-gazers of our time extol, and dignify with the title of eccentric and sophisticated reveries of her sublime and ill-humoured daughter. Grignan alone maintains its dignity, and shall be consecrated here among other monuments of that bewitching period, and amongst which one is so glad to lose one's self, and drink oblivion of an æra so very unlike. The awkward bigots to despotism in our time, have not Madame Sevigné's address, nor can, like her, paint an Indian idol, with an hundred hands, as graceful as the Apollo Belvidere. "I shall soon want your protection in Westminster-hall against the Bishops, an odious race, whether clerical or laic. You heard how infamously I have been treated by Colonel and by Ned Bishop. Oh! they could not be worse if they were in orders! Yours,-HORACE Walpole.” Augustan. How severe is your friend upon the clergy in the close of his letter! I have known many who reflected upon them, but have always found reasons, of various species, for distrusting either the soundness of their understanding, or the goodness of their hearts. A sly creature this Welch judge of ours. No man, or woman either, better knows how to frame a sentence which she, to whom it is addressed, may interpret praise or satire, as her conscience shall dictate. Of this Janus-species is the paragraph in your last, which says,-" Your letter of to-day is, more than all its predecessors, above this visible diurnal sphere." I grant you, ascendant, and not ascension, ought to have been the word. It was certainly climbing above the visible diurnal sphere with a stiff knee; but I always write in too much haste to pause for best-possible verbalisms; and to my pen the prompt is oftener the poetical than the prose-expression. I may say, with Cowley to the muse, "When my new mind had no infusion known That, ever since, I vainly try To wash away th' inherent dye." So pray have patience when I come striding along upon the stilts she gave me, because I cannot stay to find my shoes. As to amity, which you grumble at, 'tis a pretty, tender, femality word, that does not walk so tall as friendship-so pray don't kick it down for a strutter. Let our great Sully alone-no sneers at his ice, I intreat! That frosty constitution has, perhaps, braced the nerves of England's credit and consequence. "What, lost Mark Antony the world?" Answer to yourself the question, and play the tempter no more! LETTER LXXXI. COURT DEWES, ESQ. AT PAW, in Berne. Lichfield, Dec. 3, 1787. I AM charmed by the alacrity' with which you have performed, in so short a time, a journey of a thousand miles. It is an admirable sign that the Continental gales will be beneficial to your health, when, through a winter so softened, you shall breathe them serenely and at leisure. How strange would it seem to us folk, who have been always fixed like a plant to one peculiar spot of English ground, were we to see days splendid as those of our warmest summers, sink into darkness soon after five o'clock. The little time allowed me for the luxury of reading, has, within the last three months, been devoted to studying the Hebraic bards, allured by Dr Gregory's admirable translation of Bishop Lowth's Lectures. They form two large quarto volumes, closely printed, and enriched with a variety of learned and ingenious notes. An attentive examination of this work, with that of all the chapters, psalms, and single passages referred to, have rendered me more conversant than I ever was before with the sacred poetry, though always an admirer of its wild and daring graces; but I cannot think with the Bishop, that, considered merely as poetry, it immeasurably, or indeed that it all transcends, the ancient and modern classics. A large portion of poetic strength, pathos, and dignity, animate the pages of David, Job, Solomon, and the Prophets; and, without taking reason or religion into the scale, there is a solemn magnificence in the system of Theism, which can never belong to Polytheism; but then the former is excluded from all that beautiful play of imagination, all the gayer graces which throw such soft and varied resplendence over the Pagan Theology, and the bold, but wild, and generally indistinct, similies and descriptions of prophetic composition, leave us little of that skilful and happy discrimination that brings the object to the eye in imagery, and to which, in sentiment, every feeling of the heart responds. LETTER LXXXII. REV. DR GREGORY. Lichfield, Dec. 5, 1787. * AND now, Sir, our day of combat is come You deny Sterne originality-and say that no classic ear can endure his style. These assertions more than surprise-they astonish me. What!—that imagination, which I have always thought of such exquisite, such original colouring!-that penetration which seems to have an hundred eyes with which to look into the human heart!—that happy, thrice happy, mixture of the humorous and the pathetic, in which he stands alone amongst all other writers out of the dramatic scale; resembling none, and whom not one, amongst his numerous * See conclusion of a former letter to this gentleman, dated Nov. 13, 1787.-S. |