ter, my line is rendered much more harmonious. ~ This word is to me as an hidden guinea, just discovered by a miser.

With what original ideas does that brain of yours teem! What spirit and frolic in the manner of your telling me, that one of the two sonnets I sent you had strength, the other softness!

But I am, beyond expression, gratified by your warm approbation of my paraphrastic translations of Horace. The praise of so perfect a master of the beauties of my original, is an armour of steel and gold, against the sneers of the pedant, who demands fidelity in a translation, at the expence of spirit and of grace. I have taken the painter's maxim for my guiding rule in these attempts" It is better to sin against truth than beauty." Sir John Demham, my friend Weston tells me, justly observes that poetry, like ether, is a very subtle and volatile spirit, which in pouring from one language into another, evaporates so much, that, if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, little more than a caput mortuum will remain. Adieu!

LETTER LXI.

MISS WILLIAMS.

Lichfield, March 3, 1789.

YOUR charming poem on the Slave Trade is a most welcome present. It would have given me great pleasure to have covered many pages in discriminating its various graces-but a recent inflammation in my eyes forbids the indulgence.

Self-partiality, which makes us fond of ideas and images that have arisen in our own minds, increases perhaps the solemn feelings, excited by the twelve first lines of your exordium. If your friend, Mr Hardinge, has thought it worth his while to preserve my letters, he could shew you one, written last April, in answer to one of his, which requested me to employ my muse on this popular subject. That letter of mine to Mr Hardinge, described scenery, and expressed ideas exactly similar to those in the first twelve lines of your poem. I never committed them to measure, through utter want of time for compositions of any length. I could obtain it only by the sacri

fice of more material things-my duties-my common-life business-and my friends.

Perhaps I wish this poem of yours had been written in the ten-feet couplet, of whose graces and powers you are so eminently mistress. I think that of eight feet requires the frequent intermixture of the line of seven syllables, in either very solemn, or very sprightly compositions, to give spirit and variety to the measure. Observe how often the seven feet line recurs in the Allegro, Il Penseroso, and in Gray's Descent of Odin.

Amongst many other happinesses in your last poem, it has great originality and beauty in its similes.

I am gratified that Mrs Siddons chose one of my darling plays for her benefit. How charming must the Law of Lombardy have been, arrayed in her graces, and in her powers! Its characters are drawn with the free hand of a master, who takes human nature rather than theatric precision for his model-and its language has Shakesperian ease and fire. Our public critics abuse it-but they are almost all composed of bad authors, whose enmity to good ones is inevitable, and, towards Mr Jephson, national jealousy increases their venom.

Charming Mrs Piozzi recommends Della Crusca's Diversity to me, as an extremely fine poemand Mr Hayley tells me, that Mrs Smith's Pegasus is of the true etherial breed-of whose Sonnets, in my opinion, Colonel Barry, as justly as wittily, said, when he was last here, that the general run of them was two or three good lines, stolen from our most popular poets, dispersed here and there in each sonnet, with ten or a dozen others of very indifferent cement.

"Alas! my gentle Helen, how must I,
Who will not flatter, and who dare not lie,"

have wounded you with cold praise, had you sent me poems with as little original poetic matter as Mrs Smith's Sonnets; or strutting in such inflated defiance of every thing like common sense, as the compositions of Della Crusca!-not but there are considerable flashes of genius in the latter, but to me they serve only to make the general darkness more visible. Such odes as Diversity will confirm, instead of invalidating Mr Mason's objection to the irregular ode―yet, since Dryden and Lord Lyttleton have proved the possibility of making sublime and beautiful poems upon that model, I wonder at Mason's reprobat

ing it. We may venture to pronounce, that a composition, which fails to interest us in irregular lyrics, would not please us better, if we were to see it reduced to the regular form-though fine odes are certainly the more perfect on that account. Adieu! my dear Miss Williams,-your's faithfully.

LETTER LXII.

George Hardinge, Eso.

Lichfield, March 5, 1789.

THE evidence you bring of Mr B's bache lor voluptuousness, is irresistibly strong. I suppose Mr Day knew it not, or, with his general abhorrence of sensuality, he had spared to mention him with so much esteem:-but, Lord! what a pale, maidenish-looking animal for a voluptuary!

-so reserved as were his manners!-and his countenance!-a very tablet, upon which the ten commandments seemed written.

There is sublime allegoric imagery in your son