pained contemplation, these same capering flowers flash on his memory, and his heart, losing its cares, dances with them again.

Surely if his worst foe had chosen to caricature this egotistic manufacturer of metaphysic importance upon trivial themes, he could not have done it more effectually! Whenever Mr Wordsworth writes naturally he charms me, as in the Kitten and the Falling Leaves; Verses to the Spade of a Friend; Written on Brother's Water Bridge; The Sailor's Mother; three or four of the sonnets, and above all the Leech-Gatherer, which is a perfectly original and striking poem. If he had written nothing else, that composition might stamp him a poet of no common powers. The sonnet written on Westminster Bridge, is beautiful, unaffected, and grandly picturesque.

The ode, second volume, p. 147, is a mixture of his successful and unsuccessful attempts at sublimity. I delight in the five first stanzas ;then it goes rumbling down the dark profound of mysticism, whither my comprehension strives to follow him in vain. The lovely stanzas are a manifest imitation of an ode of Coleridge's, of very superior beauty, beginning, "Well, if the bard was weather-wise," &c.

An anonymous present of three volumes came to me lately: Letters from England, by Don

Manuel Esprielli, translated from the Spanish. On many subjects they form a deeply-learned, and on all on which they treat, a very amusing work, abounding in the oddest possible sectarian anecdotes, and heretic history and information. Of our customs and manners, national virtues, prejudices, absurdities, and faults, it is a faithful picture; so faithful and comprehensive, as to make me doubt its being a translation. I think no foreigner either would or could take the trouble of tracing, with observation at once so extended and minute, the subtle maze of national characteristics.

These books appear to me likely to attract the attention of the higher class of readers, whom they are competent at once to interest and inform. They contain the best account I have seen of the Cumberland lakes. The author, whether foreigner or native, has drawn and discriminated their different features in the most distinct and vivid tints. He enables us to perceive the peculiar features of each picturesque mirror, its incumbent mountains and marginal woods; and conveys to his reader certain singularities of appearance, which no other tourist has noticed; which the eye of genius perhaps could only have remarked.

Two letters from the poetically-great Southey

have delighted me much. My avowed sense of Madoc's poetic excellence having reached his ear, it procured me the honour of its author's correspondence. He excites my concern and indignation by saying, that the profits on a year's sale of that glorious poem, amounted to L. 3: 17:1; a deep disgrace to the national sensibility and judg

ment.

Critics, who are either incapable of feeling poetic beauty, and mistake sublimity for bombast, or fraudulently withhold the praise they know to be due, are alike the foes of individual genius, and of the national credit, when thus they labour to rob a first-rate poet of fortune and of early celebrity. What caterpillars in the bright roses of poetry, what wasps and hornets on the feet of Colossal literature, are such impotent, or such dishonest deciders!

If I live I shall hope to see you again my guest, and for a longer period than that of your first, and recent and dearly welcome visit, with all that kindness of heart and hilarity of spirit which are so much your own, and which act upon our feelings like a May-day sun. Adieu!

LETTER LXVII.

CAPTAIN HASTINGS* of the 82d Regiment, off Copenhagen.

Lichfield, Sept. 7, 1807.

DEAR Hastings, my heart is pierced with anguish by the tidings of your calamity. It is long since I have been so terribly shocked. My thoughts wander to your pillow many times every hour; indeed my spirits have, in no intervening instant, lost the gloom in which this event has wrapped them. The whole town mourns for you, even those to whom you are only known by the fair report of your seldom-equalled virtues, but none, except the General and Mrs Pigot, so deeply mourn as myself.

Good Heaven! that when only four of our officers suffered, you should be one! Yet you live

*He lost his left arm in the first action of that wild and most dishonourable expedition. Captain Hastings had been three years in Lichfield, aide-de-camp to General Pigot, and in that time lost his beloved and excellent wife. For a farther account of this gentleman, see some of the preceding and following letters.-S.

--your wound, though dreadful, we are assured by your surgeons, will not prove mortal. That is our only consoling hope.

And surely you, who so well deserve the good will and kind offices of all who know you;— you, who were as a ministering angel by the couch of long-protracted suffering!-O! I hope you have humane friends who watch by you, to administer every possible assistance and comfort.

Alas! I often think-blessed is the departed, to have escaped the anxious misery which, by this event, she must have endured! Yet be cheered, my excellent friend! patient and collected I know you are, for where is there a firmer spirit? I pray to God to sustain and give you strength to recover from this cruel stroke, without irreparable loss of health, and then future danger to a life so valuable, in this dreadful, this interminable war, may, and I trust will be, precluded by the present misfortune.

Yes, the tender father will be spared to his children!-your rulers will not send you into action again! you will be permitted to return. home so soon as you shall be well enough to bear the voyage-You will be restored to your situation here. Government will surely recompense you as it recompensed young Captain Le Blanc, who lost his leg in battle seven years ago,