designed for the eye of friendship ?-and why should our style be eloquent only when we are writing to the world? I have bewildered you in the mazes of criticism. You will be glad to get out of them. So will you, for my sake, to hear that my poor dear father yet lives in tolerable ease, though the dart of death has been often shook over his feeble head since I wrote to you last. Lady Moira honours me by the predilection which you flatter me she feels in my favour. Cherish it for me, I pray you. Mrs Gastril continues to receive sacerdotal homage, as usual. Adieu! May the piate its long delay! length of this epistle ex Yet, if you happen to dis like critical investigation, the purposed atonement forms the greater sin. Yours, very faithfully. LETTER XXXIX. GEORGE HARDINGE, ESO. Lichfield, Oct. 10, 1788. I AM not inexorable, nor so arrogant, as to think lightly of any person's talents or virtues, be cause they may happen not to treat me with that respect, and attention to the communicated circumstances of my situation, which I have been accustomed to receive; but my leisure is incompetent to the various claims upon it, which seem to increase daily; and, if I resume my correspondence with Mr H., I must neglect those who have never treated me with disrespect. I flatter myself that we have mutually our merits; but there is a certain uncongeniality in our ideas and opinions, which has betrayed, and always will, if we continue to correspond, betray us into saying things to each other which neither can like to hear.. Upon the cover of the most sarcastic letter ever penned, I have written, "to be read frequently, as a medicine against vanity.” When you hold out to my regard for you the bait of kind and gratifying avowals, I fly to this letter, for conviction how impossible it is that you can have any real esteem for talents, which you fancy disgraced by vulgarism, and for a disposition which you believe deformed by the most ungoverned violence of temper. How can you be so unjust to yourself, as to throw away a wish, a minute upon such a being ?-and how can I help turning from you to those who think better of me? ; It is, perhaps, right to make an exchange of our letters. I promise, upon my honour, to return yours the instant you send me mine ; to return all except the medicinal one, which I must keep to be a check upon my rising pride, when flattery or partiality seeks to persuade me that I am ingenious and respectable.—Adieu ! LETTER XL. MR NEWTON. Lichfield, Oct. 12, 1788. THE disease, which has so malignantly visited yourself and your poor wife, now oppresses me, but with less severity. Ill as I am, and sighing under the pressure of much writing, when all writing is prejudicial to me; yet my heart will not be restrained from assuring you of its sympathy, and of its hope, that health and peace are, by this time, re-established in your mansion. Never was your imagination more lovely than in the letter before me, notwithstanding its mourning raiment. It places me by you upon the heathbush, on the sunny-side of one of my native moun tains. The particular names, so familiar to my recollection, of the hills, the cliffs, the woods, and the valleys, which form that wide landscape, then stretched before you, brought it to my eye with many a thrill of affectionate pleasure: "He sang of Tay, of Forth, and Clyde, Of Leader Haughs, and Yarrow Side, Some of my hours have passed pleasantly away since we parted, in the society of dear Mr and Mrs Whalley, who came to see me in September. The former, engaged in building, and in opening a little Edenic habitation, in a bloomy wilderness, could stay only a week; but the latter was my guest during three. She is a pleasing rational companion, infinitely estimable, though genius may not have infused her ideas, as those of her husband, in its etherial dyes. My poor father has twice, within these seven weeks, been re-visited by his terrible convulsion fits, yet recovered from each of these attacks in a few days. On the 17th of this month, please God he lives to see it, his 80th year will be completed. Scarce less than a miracle his living to see it, so often as, in the course of the last eight, the dart of death has been shook over his feeble frame. My father being quite as well as usual while Mr and Mrs Whalley were with us, you will imagine, that it was a golden week. I introduced our young poets to him, Cary and Lister, of whom he thus writes, in a letter I received from him yesterday :-"Have you seen the reserved and pensive Cary, since I left you? He is a very extraordinary lad, strongly marked in manners, as well as mind, by the hand of genius. His total freedom from ostentation, and severe kind of simplicity, are uncommon features at any, and much more at his age, in a nation so immersed in luxury, vanity, vice, and varnished manners, as is England now. Dear lovely little Lister! I hope he will conquer that unfortunate impediment in his speech, and be enabled to pursue the shining path open to his fine abilities, and thirst of literary acquirements.” Indeed they are charming youths; yet is there one thing that I could wish otherwise in both of them,-an aptness to decide too arrogantly against general opinion, to take whimsical aversions to beautiful writers, and of established fame in their own.science. They assert, that Pope had little natural genius, and that his splendid graces were |