frequently traced the prima stamina of several images in Milton and other poets. Only once in these cantos did I find a probable source of modern poetry. Possibly the strange imagination on page 295 suggested the tale of Donica in Southey's first miscellaneous volume; but I cannot subscribe to your suggestion that Dante's three-headed devil was the origin of that fine description of the different and successive changes in the agitated countenance of Lucifer.

"Thus while he spoke each passion dimm'd his face.
Thrice chang'd with pale ire, envy, and despair.”

Why should we impute this simply-grand portrait of a demoniac countenance to a conception in the Italian bard too grotesque and monstrous to be sublime, or in any degree an object of imitation to a poet so dignified as Milton?

This second part of the Inferno increases my wonder at the longevity of Dante's fame. Few are the passages of genuine poetry, of power to mitigate the ridiculous infelicity of plot; an epic poem consisting wholly of dialogue and everlasting egotism! Were you never struck by the presumptuous malice of design in this poem? with the inherent cruelty of that mind which could delight in suggesting pains and penalties at once so

odious and so horrid? The terrible graces of the Inferno lose all their dignity in butcherly, gridiron, and intestinal exhibitions, which become fatal to our esteem for the contriver.

I best like the thirty-second and thirty-third cantos. Their pictures are less disgustingly shocking, and more within the powers of our conception. Of the exterior symptoms of perishing coldness we have seen some resembling instances. The following passage has a portion of sublimity.

-A thousand visages

Then mark'd I, which the keen and eager cold
Had shap'd into a doggish grin ;"

but in the fiery punishments, the representation of talking flames can be nothing but ridiculous. O! how the hell of Dante sinks before the infernal regions of our own Milton!

In several passages you have not been able to remove the veil of inflated and dense obscurity which envelopes the meaning of this fire and smoke poet. Your notes tell us the names and terrestrial residences of the punished, but throw no light upon half what the poet says about them. Dante is the only poetic author, of high reputation, whom I cannot understand. I think if you

had fully comprehended the enigmas you have Anglicized, you would, by more perspicuous language, have enabled your readers to understand them also, though perhaps at the expence of some portion of that literality unfortunately the first object of so many translators. Let the versifying translator be tenacious on that head, but the poetic ones, Cowper and Cary, should have scorned it; at least in parts where the original has not expressed its meaning perspicuously.

The twenty-fourth canto opens with a description of hoar-frost similarized to snow, and it has somewhat of the softer grace of modern poetry; and though I cannot refer to the page, there is a simile of rills hastening to the Arno, which presents a pleasing landscape.

"In the world,

So may thy name still lift its forehead high.”—

The forehead of a name!! It was by such extravagant personification that Mr Hayley injured his poetry, even some of his best.

Page 195 is the filthiest horridness I ever met without the limits of this volume, for within it there is yet transcending filthiness.-Good heavens! what strange writing will not time sanction? Justly does Shenstone observe, "We par

don, nay admire, that in an ancient, for which we should execrate a modern poet."

It surprises me, amongst a great deal of good blank-verse, to observe you frequently making use. of expressions which debase it, such as folk for souls in hell, tell on't for tell of it, liker, maul, and other similar vulgarisms. Where (as in Madoc) they occur in works of great human interest from story, dramatic oration, tender pathetic sentiments, and vivid landscape, their use is less mischievous-but recollect what sonorous magnificence of phraseology, what never-stooping dignity of numbers Milton employs in the infernal regions. If, in other parts of the Paradise Lost, he has rigid lines, and plain language, I think we never find them in the realms of misery. The terrible graces should not be slip-shod. Even Southey never permits that.

I hope they have not ranged your horizon so formidably as of late they have appalled ours,

"When the thunder,

Wing'd with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Shook our high spires."

VOL. VI.

LETTER LV.

REV. DR MANSEL, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Lichfield, Aug. 28, 1806.

You are as good to me upon paper as you were in conversation;-you gratify my aspiration after lettered praise, and give to my solicitation one of the most pointed little epigrammatic satires I ever saw. Mr Simpson will consider it as a recovered treasure. He pommelled his temples because the good folk within had been so little faithful to their trust on its subject.-Accept my best thanks for the copy.

Those scintillations of the fancy which constitute wit, have been inadequately defined by the poets and critics, when describing them in the abstract. Dryden says, "Wit is a propriety of thoughts and words adapted to the subject." In the sixty-third number of the Spectator, Addison points out the impotence of that definition, and truly says, that it applies only to general good writing; but he approves Locke's account of wit, which he quotes, and which appears to me scarce