Though, at length, his poetic genius burst through all the obstacles of his various professional studies, and of his immense and incessant practice as a physician, yet he never had leisure to read obsolete compositions. He, I believe, read neither French nor Italian, and knew nothing of the elder English poets. Even with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, he was not by any means familiar. Pope and Akenside, Collins, Gray, and Mason, were his favourite English classics.

You do not say in what language the poem, concerning which you accuse him, was written.

I never heard of it, who was always much more versed than was Darwin in the nearly forgotten compositions of olden time. My little poem on the cultivation of his valley, and which he afterwards, somewhat unfairly, incorporated into his own great work, was, I am sure, the spark which lighted up the rich magazine of his genius. I witnessed the first pleasurable start of the idea in his mind, recorded in page 130th of the Memoirs; that of making new Ovidian metamor phoses from the sexual system of plants, which

and ought to have received honourable acknowledgment on his part; otherwise, when the basis of his work is known to the world, his candour will receive a deep wound."-From Mc Lee Philips' letter.-S.

11

he always spoke of as first discovered by Lin

næus.

The coincidence of idea with that of another poet, respecting the plan, is very credible; but if similitude of separate parts, of sentiment, of landscape, and of imagery can be traced, it may be such as to exceed all probability of coincidence, and bring home the charge of plagiarism. Yet, even then, why was Darwin bound to do that which many of his renowned predecessors had omitted to do, viz. to produce the rude blocks upon which they modelled their exquisite forms? Mr Hayley, in his Life of Milton, has given the Italian Drama, which is a skeleton of the plan of the Paradise Lost, while the prima stamina of all the Edenic scenes, images, and sentiments, may be found in Sylvestris' translation of the French poet, Du Bartas. For the Pandemonian scenery, it is well known how large were Milton's debts to Homer, Virgil, and particularly to Dante; yet the discovery of all these sources our glorious epic poet left to time, and the researches of his readers.

Mr Thomas Warton's priceless edition of Milton's lesser poems, shews us the plan and thoughts of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso in old Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Even Shakespeare,

the most original poet in the world, built almost all his dramas on ballads and old tales, and on history. Virgil makes no acknowledgment of all he took from Theocritus and Homer.

Not one of those great masters point back to their fountains; and who, for that omission, reproaches them with want of candour? Why, therefore, should that charge be brought against Darwin, if indeed, which I do not yet believe, he built upon buried foundations! You surprise me still more by considering him as having written to the capacity of the vulgar. Never was poetry less calculated than his to that meridian.

It requires native taste for the Aonian art, and long familiarity with its produce, to comprehend and admire the charms of his philosophic, metaphoric, and allusive verse, with all its sonorous Latinity of style. If his materials are heterogeneous, he renders them admirably subservient to poetic purposes;-his arch-chemic wand turns the commonest metals into gold;-but it is such gold as the common mind knows not to appreciate; when a mind of ability takes it for tinsel, great to me seems the wonder.

Darwin knew that his verse would live to distant ages; but he also knew that it would survive, by the slowly accumulating suffrages of kindred genius, when contemporary jealousy had ceased to

operate. With that longevity, present circulation had not much to do. I have often smiled to hear him boast of his " so much money per couplet," conscious, as I was, that it was an artful way of telling us how highly his talents were rated. Himself and his bookseller, aware how little, by the mass of readers, poetry of the higher orders was relished, depended for the sale of the work chiefly upon the novelty of the design, and the variously scientific instruction of the notes ;but, after he commenced poet, not one of the tribe was ever more tenacious of poetic fame than Darwin. To accelerate that, he concealed his ambition and exulting consciousness of his right to its palm, in the mask of worldly thrift. Darwin would not have written meanly, for any price that folly would have paid him for stooping his muse to her level.

Adieu, dear Sir! The family of your highly and justly esteemed friend, through twenty-five happy years, are comfortably established, and all his debts are discharged. God gave me the means— and my best use for life is to fulfil all that I am conscious he fervently wished. I remain, with much esteem, &c.

LETTER XXIII.

LIEUT.-COL. R. WOLSELEY.

Lichfield, March 21, 1804.

AVOWED approbation from those whose talents we rate high, in whose sincerity we confide, and for whom we feel affectionate esteem, is the fairest and most precious meed of intellectual exertion meant for the eye of the public. Your obliging letter confers it; but, as in all other sublunary pleasures, bitter mixes with the sweet ;you are out of health, and military duties, even though yet they are bloodless, bear hard on a delicate constitution, which malady is in the habit of assailing.

I do not expect to live till the belligerent furor of the English shall subside so far as to render them capable of perceiving the folly, the insanity of attempting impossibilities; till they shall cry with a voice so universal, that their government must listen to it,-Give us peace. Alas! what but increase of danger to us, and great acquisition

of

power to France, has the recommencement of hostilities brought against us!