ful how often in my bosom arose the pale light of memory, gleaming on departed years; on groups assembled in that mansion, amid which one fair spirit shone whose earthly light has now been long extinguished.

I rejoice in the promising nature of your filial prospects, as in the virtues of your sons. Their morning of life is sunny; may its noon and evening be cloudless!-Vain and improbable benediction!-the wish of friendship rather than the hope of experience. We may perhaps more rationally address to them that fine couplet in Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes:

"Expect not life from pain and danger free,
"Nor dream the doom of man revers'd for thee!"

LETTER LVIII.

MR SEWARD of Birmingham.

Lichfield, Dec. 9, 1806.

Ан, yes, England has at last, toward the continent at least, completed the measure of her incendiary madness; ruined past all hope her allies,

and drawn ten times trebled danger and difficulties upon herself. If she does not soon purchase peace, even at that unavoidably-humiliating price as to its terms, to which her own infatuation has reduced her, those miseries must be speedily her own which she felt no remorse in bringing upon other nations, against the warning voice of her great deceased patriot, in this long and disastrous war; even the giant woes of seeing our country its bloody theatre. To bend at last beneath the omnipotence of events, and beneath the chastizement of heaven, must as certainly be national as it is individual wisdom. But what shall we do with our pride?—Sacrifice it as we did when we sought reconcilement with our invaded colonies, and be rewarded by long years of peace, and its blooming and blessed comforts.

It appears from your last letter, that several of our ancestors were painted by Sir Peter Lely. What pity that the fair and interesting portrait you describe, the work of that delicate pencil, should have been exposed, through want of care, to the cankering tooth of time and domiciliary dilapidation. My beauteous grandmother, the immediate parent of my father, is fortunately in very wonderful preservation, her date considered. My father, born in her 45th year, and in the year

1708, carries her youth into the latter part of Charles the Second's reign, the period at which Sir Peter drew that picture of our male ancestor, which is now at Wilton near Salisbury. My grandmother's picture looks about twenty-two. There is no marked want of harmony, either in the dress or colouring, between that pride of the seventeenth century and Romney's full-length portrait of me, drawn in 1786. When I shall have the pleasure to shew you the Lelyean Lady, you will think me vain perhaps, in mentioning the resemblance between these portraits which struck our celebrated Glover, and also several other lessmasterly judges; but the utmost boast of my rising youth did not amount to a moiety of her charms. If any family-resemblance does really exist, as many think may be yet traced in my time-faded face, to this youthful beauty, the apparent grandmotherism seems now reversed be

tween us.

How those hereditary traits, which constitute resemblance, are compounded from generation to generation! I am thought very like both my immediate parents, who bore no likeness of each other; and, on tracing back my penciled ancestors, you tell me my features and countenance are found in my great-grandfather at Wilton, by

Sir Peter Lely, and here they are thought to resemble the transcript of his daughter-in-law, by the same celebrated painter.

Through life I have only known one person, of whom in air, in features, and in countenance I could never meet a striking likeness. That graceful unique in the ever-varying expression of eye and of smile, I shall on earth behold no more; and from that hour of deprivation I have looked in vain in every stranger's face whom I met, for a similitude which half a century had failed to shew me. Adieu!

LETTER LIX.

WALTER SCOTT, Esq. of Edinburgh.

Lichfield, Jan. 29, 1807.

CAPTAIN HASTINGS, the deprived, the intelligent, and the excellent, sets out in a day or two for your city. It contains three little girls, to whom, in his prime of life, he is, alas! the only parent. Their mother was one of the best of women. In situations cruelly trying, she exerted fortitude superior to much for which heroes have

been celebrated. Captain Hastings' tender and unwearied attention to her, through the course of a long and evidently mortal illness, sustained by her with the sweetest patience and cheerfulness; his deep, and yet unsubdued anguish for her loss, render him highly estimable and interesting, while the lettered cultivation of naturally fine talents, enables him to reward every attention shewn him, and that by companionable powers of no everyday growth. My regard for this gentleman has no means of shewing itself so much to his advantage, as by my endeavouring to procure for him the honour and happiness of an introduction to you. He reads your poetry with enthusiasm warm as my own; and it has been a theme between us, over which our sentiments touched at all points.

"And when he caught its measures wild *,
The mourner rais'd his head, and smil'd;
And lighted up his faded eye,

E'en with a poet's ecstacy.”

Now permit me to thank you for your charming letter of the 18th instant. From the fear of intruding too often upon hours so precious to the present, and so pledged to the future time, the de

* Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel.-S.