LETTER XXXVIII.

REV.

BERWICK.

Lichfield, Oct. 6, 1788

WITH more wit than justice, my dear Sir, does your last letter rally me upon one of the mortifying circumstances of my situation, that of being unable, through want of leisure, to cultivate frequent epistolary intercourse with my absent friends, and to form new connections of that sort with the ingenious and the amiable who honour me with their notice. Alas! when to such I am silent, it is never from indolence.

Too soon, however, does your letter grow seri ous, and complain of mournful devastations in the hoarded treasures of the heart. Mine has known what it is to grieve from that source of sorrow, and breathes sympathetic sighs for your loss. Three dear friends torn away in three short months!—it is a trial that bears hard upon the spirits. I hope the fourth, whom you hint as being worse than dead, has since been restored to the comforts of existence. I was glad that time

had so far healed the wounds of deprivation, that your health no longer suffered.

A more beautiful poetic image I never met than that presented in the lines you quoted on this melancholy occasion; Memory, sitting at the altar she has raised to Woe, and feeding the source of her own tears.

You inquire after my poetical sister, Mrs C. Smith. I never saw her, and know only the mere outline of her history as the wife of a profligate spendthrift, who lived near Mr Hayley in Sussex, and there dissipated his fortune. A fine woman in her person, and the mother of many children. Popular as have been her sonnets, they always appeared to me as a mere flow of melancholy and harmonious numbers, full of notorious plagiarisms, barren of original ideas and poetical imagery. You observe, that, till Mrs Smith's sonnets appeared, you had considered the sonnet as a light and trivial composition. Boileau says that "Apollo, tired with votaries who assumed the name of poet, on the slight pretence of tagging flimsy rhymes, invented the strict, the rigorous sonnet as a test of skill ;"—but it was the legitimate sonnet which Boileau meant, not that facile form of verse which Mrs Smith has taken, three elegiac stanzas closing with a couplet. Petrarch's, and Milton's, and Warton's sonnets are

legitimate. Some of Milton's are hard and unpleasing, and one is evidently burlesque, and was certainly never intended by him for publication; but the best of them, that to the soldier to spare his dwelling-place; that on the Piedmont massacre, to Cyriac Skinner on his own blindness, and that sweet one to Laurence, are the patterns of excellence in the English sonnet. They have the plain majestic energy, characteristic of that species of poetry, and blend the undulating pause of blank verse with rhyme, and so prevent the ear from being cloyed with the quadruple recurrence of similar sounds. There is beauty also in the sonnet to the nightingale, and in that to his deceased wife, but they are less perfect than the former. That to Oliver Cromwell, as far as the word" war," is, amidst its energetic plainness, sublime in the first degree; but it concludes unhappily.

Of Mrs Smith's sonnets, I must observe, that I have only seen the first edition; in the preface to which she says, "If, in these sonnets, there are any lines taken from other poets, I am unconscious of the theft. The first of these sonnets concludes:

"Ah! then how dear the muses' favours cost,
If those paint sorrow best who feel it most."

Pope's concluding line in his Eloisa to Abelard,

is:

"He best shall paint them who shall feel them most."

There is a pretty image in Mrs Smith's second sonnet, but it is taken from Collins:

"Till spring again shall call forth every bell, And dress, with humid hands, her wreaths again.”—Mrs S.

"Till spring, with dewy fingers cold,

Returns to deck their hallow'd mould."-Collins.

That second sonnet concludes thus:

"Ah! why has happines no second spring?"

This conclusion is a very inferior imitation of Beattie's" Hermit's Complaint," of which the ensuing lines form the last verse:

"Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn,
Kind nature the embryo blossoms will save :
But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn;
O! when will she dawn on the night of the grave."

Mrs Smith asking the question of happiness, which Beattie asks of the spring, proves the mischiefs of injudicious imitation.

Your friend Mr - tells me he suspects Mrs Piozzi gave Johnson's letters to the world that they might form a decent vechicle for the publication of her own. It appears to me, that the

natural desire of letting the world know how highly she was esteemed by a person so distinguished, -how constantly, during so many years, she engaged his revering attention, was the masterspring of that publication. If she had chosen to have printed her own letters, I cannot think she needed any excuse-any vehicle for introducing them to the public. There is no greater vanity in publishing one's letters, than one's essays or poems. You say you like no letters but Swift's: Surely, my dear Sir, there is more than one beautiful style of letters. Swift's are pleasant in the humorous chit-chat way. Those, however, please me better

"That steer,

From grave to gay, from lively to severe."

Why should not genius expand in private letters; describe scenery with the glow of the painter; characters with the fire of the dramatist; moralize with the dignity of the philosopher; and sometimes, under the pressure of sorrow, court"Fancy as the friend of woe?" Why, in short, should any charming efflorescence of the imagination be banished from the page which is