love. When I think of him, and of those others, who with him, shall, in future times, be mentioned to the honour of this town, Pope's beautiful lines rise in my memory, and express the fond ambition of my spirit :

"O, while along the stream of time their name
Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame,

Say shall my little bark attendant sail,
Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale ?”

Adieu! for it is more than time. I purposed to have sent you a tolerably short letter-and lo! a most intolerably long one! Which is to blame, your magnetism or my loquacity?

LETTER LX.

WALTER SCOTT, ESQ.

Lichfield, April 17, 1807.

It is only eight days since your valuable packet, dated February 20th, reached me through a private and unknown channel. To have left so much goodness so long unacknowledged, would

have been ingratitude indeed, unless utter imbecility, by sickness, had produced the delay.

The introductory stanzas to your new poem, Flodden-Field, have the first claim upon my grateful attention. Till after the close of your panegyric on our glorious Nelson, all is worthy of your enchanting muse, and is gathered to the much that evinces your injustice in fancying modern poetic talent in a state of dwarfism, from the days of Chaucer, Spencer, and Dryden; and in deeming them giants in comparison with their

successors.

I bear glowing testimony to the giantism of Shakespeare, compared, not only to his dramatic successors, but to all his boasted predecessors of Greece and Rome. Other diminution, with my whole soul, I disavow. Unaccountable as it is, even the men of genius in Great Britain have, from the first dawn of poesy amongst us to this hour, been infected with the morbid idea of diminished strength and faded imagination in their own times; and by such thankless and unpatriotic avowals, they fed, and continue to feed, the envy of the prose folk.

With what a never-excelled wintry landscape your introduction to Flodden-Field opens! You place me in the scene, and the cold thrill of sym

pathy runs through my veins as I read. Nature, Genius-you are alike inexhaustible; and as you were coeval from the first of days, coëval is your progress, and coë val will be your end.

To the fountains of nature, the mere versifiers have no access. Their book-made streams pall and sicken on the taste. They are the real dwarfs of the science, and they have alike encumbered every period, and every clime.

The connoisseur in painting knows originals from copies, by certain fresh and vivid touches; so also those who have been long versed in poetic reading, know originals from copies in poetry.

Now to your mountain bard, James Hogg,luckless name!-I am too familiar with the ancient Scotch, to find any difficulty in understanding him. He is another poetic miracle, rising up from the lowest of your peasantry. Though I do not believe that he will ever reach the heights which Burns ascended, or ever produce a poem of such length, consequence, and interest as Bloomfield (inferior as he is to Burns) has given us; yet in some of the original unimitative compositions of James H., I perceive vivid and not infrequent flashes of real genius.

There is no lack of genius in these wild lays, but a grievous one of taste and judgment; and I

conclude, from the writer's avowed obstinacy of resistance to friendly criticism, that he will never acquire them.

Depend on my doing all the, alas! little in my power to recommend this extraordinary and worthy man to the public notice. Our book-club, to the disgrace of our city's old classic renown, has set its broad dull face against the admission of poetry; and Mr H. White shook his head hopelessly, when I desired he would endeavour to get the lays of the mountain bard ordered by its directors. They have not sent for any verse since the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Madoc, which they did vouchsafe to admit, on my sending them word, that it would be shameful if they did not order two poems of such first-rate beauty.

The men of genius, the literati, and the nobles of Scotland, energetically patronize the rising talents of their country; and, so doing, promote the interest of their possessors, and bring their fame to early maturity. As for England, it is not so with her. She has no nationality respecting poetic productions. Her colder, and, in that respect, less generous sons, believe the many who have, at all times, been ready to tell them that poetry is in a weak and dwindled state. They believed it in the days of Spencer, of Milton, of Dryden, of Collins, and of Otway.

Pope and Cowper alone saw the blushing honours of their fame flourishing around them. Enchanting writers as they were, it was not to their genius that they were indebted for that early celebrity. Party influence procured it for Pope, and religious enthusiasm for Cowper. The methodist class are calculated at fifty thousand.

From the writers of Spencer's period, I have gathered that it was the fashion to speak degradingly of his powers, in comparison with those of Chaucer; from those of Milton's time, and from the writers during seventy years after his death, I find that he was thought little compared to Spencer. Most of those who so pronounced, had doubtless never examined with attention the glorious works of the bard of Eden, which they thus profaned; but so it was, so it is, and so it will be said of future as well as present great writers.

I remember it the fashion to speak scornfully of the immortal odes of Gray; to echo for them Johnson's envious quotation" bubble bubble, toil and trouble," as applied to them. I forgot another exception to the foregoing observations; Capel Loft has procured for Bloomfield, through his interest with the other reviewers, early and profitable celebrity, higher perhaps than even the Farmer's Boy can justly claim. justly claim. The rest of its