Present me devoutly to your beloved Lady Eleanor. Most interesting is your description of that visit, mutually paid to the desolate and silent Dinbren. How worthy of yourselves that hour of consecration, with all its tributary sighs! Too happy were the days and weeks which I passed beneath its roof, and in its beautiful and sublime environs, to permit such revisitation from

me.

It would break my heart amid its present consciousness, spread over with a dark and impervious pall, which can never never be drawn away. Dear, and amiable Miss Ponsonby, farewell.

LETTER XL.

REV. H. F. CARY.

Lichfield, Aug. 8, 1805.

My contemplation of your recent literary party has been very pleasant. Seldom is it that six people meet, who all know to feel and to appreciate the powers of poetic genius; meet in such a dear embowered seclusion, uninvaded by lessprivileged spirits; with the treasures of Madoc

for your banquet, new to four of you!-but that charming work rises on our admiration by repeated perusal. I have heard it four times read aloud, and listened with delight, which "grew by what it fed upon.

Perhaps familiarity with the higher orders of verse may be necessary to the adequate perception and appreciation of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, though assuredly one of the most exquisite effusions of poetic fancy that graces our language; but Madoc bears a master-key to every bosom where but common good sense, and any thing resembling a human heart, inhabit; while the dropping lights of imagination, viz. picture and landscape, meet us on almost every page; landscape, fresh and vivid, from exhaustless and inexhaustible nature.

The difference between the Last Lay, &c. and Madoc appears to be that which subsists between the Tempest, the Midsummer Night's Dream, and Cymbeline, and Othello. Only the thorough lovers of poetry taste the two first—all taste and feel the two second.

Joan of Arc is a noble epic, but Madoc transcends it greatly, and all its interests are British. Madoc has more for the understanding and the heart than any composition without the pale of Shakespeare and Richardson. Its heroes are not indebted to impossible feats and hyperbolic ex

aggeration for the grandeur of their characters. This poem was born for the full refutation of the Bishop of Worcester's dogmas concerning the indispensability of supernatural machinery to epic excellence.

We are all much amused by the ridiculous misquotation in the Gentleman's Magazine in its review of your Dante, where they make you confess that the poet you have translated, is, instead of one of the most obscure, one of the most obscene writers; while the literati will instantly perceive the mistake, it is likely to procure the circulation of your work amongst a certain and numerous class of beings, those gross voluptuaries, to whom chaste poesy is a dead letter.

O! we have had such an up-hill business in toiling through two volumes and a half of Todd's Spencer, with its voluminous annotations. I never liked that poet, but now, by intimacy, like him worse than ever. To me there is little genius in the fabrication of such hobgoblin tales. I am wholly at a loss to guess what has procured for Spencer the high place he holds amongst our classics.

I once thought that there was a prejudice against Spencer in my mind, and that not having endured to do more than dip into his poems, too little of him was known to me to judge him fair

ly; but now am I self-acquitted for scorning to turn from the statues of Apollo and Antinous to pore over the blocks of a barber's shop, with a few primroses, violets, and cowslips stuck about their bald pates. So here is a three-months blister upon my patience, and a four-guineas obligation upon my gratitude!

You, dear Cary are, I think, an admirer of Spencer, and will deem this epistle heretical.

Adieu!

LETTER XLI.

MISS PONSONBY.

Lichfield, Oct. 31, 1805.

NOTHING, my dear Madam, is so common as hypocrisy and treachery where property is concerned; but a greater excess of them never poured their dark currents from the vulgar heart, than in those circumstances which your last letter nar

rates.

Thus ever be extortionate villany baffled—and long unclouded be the peace which succeeds to that attempted injury! I cannot express how

much I am obliged that you took the kind trouble of retracing the road of peril, which had so nearly engulfed a scene, whose beauties rise perpetually in my sleeping and waking dreams.

How sorry am I to condole with you on the commenced accomplishment of my assured prophecy concerning the fate of this new coalition against France! I was deeply aware of the delusive nature of those hopes by which it was stimulated. I felt assured that the inferior Germanic powers would take the stronger side; that Buonaparte was too great a general to wait the junction of the Russian and Austrian armies, ere he began his attack upon the latter; but that insolence, by which the emperor of Germany forced Bavaria to unite with the French, exceeded even those fears for his common-sense, which his rash acceptance of English subsidies had excited. Surely he had received sufficient proofs of their impotence to render him victorious! Equally outstripping my fears, proves the triumphant welcome which the son-in-law of our king gave to Napoleon, added to the 8000 soldiers by which he augments the overwhelming armies of that emperor. I was convinced that Prussia would not desert him, because it is not her interest to do so. She looks to him for aggrandizement, springing