less liberal than ingenious. He will have the goodness to suffer a brief comment upon the surprise I felt at a passage in his interesting pamphlet on the Curtis subject, with which much just and very eloquent political writing is interwoven. He will have no doubt that I mean the following sentence: “that Mr. Pope suffered his own contemporaries and panegyrists to defame the memory of Dryden ;-not by failing to prevent, but by failing to repel those attacks, was the distinction most clearly stated and most ably defended by Mr. Weston himself, and by his antago nists either strangely overlooked or grossly misrepresented."

Now the preface to the Woodmen of Arden, which produced this controversy, says nothing about Pope's imputed guilt consisting in failing to repel the public preferences of his verse to Dryden's, but accuses him of baseness in suffering such prefe rences to appear, which are there deemed insidious arts to undermine the fame of Dryden. This accusation is absurd upon the face of it; whether on its original ground of suffering what there is no reason to suppose he could prevent, or on the shifted ground of failing to repel the preferences of his muse to Dryden's.

Mr. Weston's antagonists, so far from overlooking or misrepresenting the charge, either in its primal or changed nature, have justified Pope on that head at least, as Mr. Dewes observed to me the other day, even in the opinion of those who concur with Mr. Weston in preferring the versification of the elder bard. Against the above imputation Pope is defended by me in the Gent. Magazine for June 1789, page 510, by an appeal to the universal prevalence of self-love, even in the very best hearts; which prevalence, if impartially consulted, must induce our readers to acquit Pope of crime, in neither feeling nor expressing displeasure at seeing his own superiority to Dryden asserted. Again, in the Magazine for September 1789, page 818, where I ask Mr. Weston if he can suppose that, if Pope had been living at the period of this controversy, I should have been so indelicate as to have consulted him ere I published my vindication of his character and of his claims, and, by that question, infer the evident improbability of his being able to prevent the appearance of similar publications. My justifying question was strengthened by observing, what honest indignation Mr. Weston would feel

were he to see me branded with imputed vanity and meanness for suffering his boundlessly partial praise of me to pass the press, since he was conscious that I knew not of its existence till I saw

it in print.

Notwithstanding his hasty assertion, I dare appeal to the more deliberate justice of Dr. Parr for Pope's acquittal of guilt in not entering the lists of critical controversy in combat against his own fame concerning the Drydenic or Popeian palm of preference. High as the bard of Twickenham avowedly thought of Dryden's powers of versification, he must naturally think yet higher of his own, to the perfection of which art and labour had co-operated with genius; so thinking, there was no dishonour in not opposing the preference which countless pens were decreeing to his verse.

I am not one of Addison's adorers in his serious essays, however I may admire his comic writings. Supposing I was to say in print, what I sincerely think, viz. that Dr. Parr's language is more nervous, more luminous, more eloquent, than Addison's, he would hardly consider it incumbent upon him in honour publicly to repel the assertion; and were his failing to do so to be imputed to an envious desire of supplanting the fame of Addison, would not he, would not his friends, spurn such injustice? In that exact predicament stands Pope beneath the accusation in question. Let us judge others as we would ourselves be judged.

Obliged to abandon his original ground of censure, Mr. Weston transfers Pope's imputed guilt in suffering general preferences of his versification to Dryden's, to the particular crime of suffering Swift to defame Dryden in his Tale of a Tub. In the Magazine for February 1791, page 140, Mr. Weston says, “Here, Mr. Urban, you find my complaint against Pope to be, not that he incited, but that he suffered Swift to ridicule that work? which Pope himself pronounced to be the most noble and spirited translation he knew in any language.""

In the Supplement to the Magazines for the year 1790, a writer signing himself B. L. A. had proved the palpable absurdity of imputing such sufferance to Pope, by showing that the Tale of a Tub had been written in Pope's infancy, and that he was only sixteen when it was printed.

Then Mr. Weston's prejudice, driven from that post of accu

sation also, condemns Pope for not publicly attacking Swift on the subject of that foolish paragraph, which disgraces its author, and not Dryden; inferring from my vindication of Pope against himself, and Pope's silence to the absurd attack of Swift upon Dryden, either that I have done too much, or that he did too little. But that plea is no less obviously fallacious than that Swift could have been restrained by a boy from the folly into which personal pique had betrayed him; and its fallacy results from the difference of situation in the respective parties. Mr. Weston and I might enter the critical lists as opponents without any marked disparity to render the contest dangerous to either; but the danger to Pope, from a similar contest with Swift, is thus demonstrated in the Magazine for March 1791, page 225 : "Swift was twenty-one years older than Pope; his reputation established; his wit awing the whole literary world; his known moroseness; the proof his injustice to Dryden afforded of unsubsiding resentments. These considerations may be supposed to have operated wisely upon Pope to let the malevolent and impotent sneer from the pen of Swift remain through life unnoticed; his own noble-minded praise sufficiently evincing how much he disdained the malice of his friend."

This writer, who dates from Yarmouth, after having proved the folly it would have been to have made such a friend an enemy, proceeds to observe, that kindred reasons existed to make me prefer silent disdain of Mr. Weston's prejudiced accusations to the vindication I entered upon of the party accused.

Thus, Sir, you see how very far Mr. Weston's antagonists have been from overlooking or misrepresenting his original charge against Pope, that of suffering what it could not be in his power to prevent; how far from overlooking or misrepresenting it in the sense into which our friend sought to explain it—that of failing to repel those attacks-Pope's own warm praise of Dryden being all the repellant which prudence allowed him to use respecting Swift's pointless sneer.

I beg your pardon for having intruded so long on your attention. I hoped to have been more brief. Impute my prolixity to its true motives, the desire of being acquitted of unfair controversy in the opinion of a character I revere, and of acquitting my favourite author on a point, where his innocence is capable of

being demonstrated. I wish he could be equally justified in all the charges brought against him by Mr. Weston in the latter part of our warfare: the revenge on Burnet, Ducket, and Lady Mary, was dark, malignant, indefensible, the impotent attempt to disavow them despicable. I remain, Sir, with the utmost respect, your obliged and obedient servant, ANNA SEWARD.

Lichfield, February 3, 1793.

DEAR AND HONOURED SIR, An alarming disease in my head and stomach makes me incapable of writing with any clearness, while I feel the employment is in itself injurious. Impute, I beseech you, to this the true cause of my not having sooner acknowledged my grateful sense of the new obligation conferred upon me by your last letter. I am not better, but confined at present to my chamber, and under the care of a physician. Finding the complaint so obstinate, I am weary of waiting for brighter hours, and impatient of the appearance of cold unthankfulness. You have been a fellow sufferer with me in bodily pain, and oppression; but their clouds were dispersing from about you when you were so good to write to me, of which I am right glad. Of the heartache you mention, every benevolent spirit must have partaken beneath their consciousness of that cruel tragedy, those vile, those bloody French have so atrociously completed at their infamous tribunal of mock justice. What dreadful warning does their unbridled guilt afford to the surrounding nations against destroying the links of subordination in station and government, which unite a nation as one common family, and which are congenial to all the economy of nature, all the dispensations of providence, all the precepts of revelation? O! when we see how much more dire the mischiefs of anarchy than were even those of a very corrupt government, surely it will induce us to be thankful, and satisfied with our own, whatever imperfections may be discovered in its texture. It is equally in vain to look for excellence unallayed by defect, in institutions as in individuals. Preponderant good ought to content us.

The gentlemen, and ladies, and tradesmen, of our little city have voluntarily put themselves into mourning for the barba rously murdered Louis, after the example of our Court. No

proofs have appeared even of those imputed treasons to the new State, which if he had practised, his oppressed and enslaved situation considered, together with the prejudices of his education, which taught him to believe his privileges unjustly, and rebelliously wrested from him, could not deserve either imprisonment, or death. Deposition, and banishment from the kingdom formed the obvious limit of the people's power over him, whose absolute sovereignty they had long, with solemn oaths, acknowledged; but alas! he was willing to wave all his hereditary claims; to cede to them the freedom they denied to him. His sole crimes ;—refusal to recognize their edicts, which the rules of their own compact empowered him to extend, and the calling upon his guards to defend him against a tumult levelled at his life. As for the suppositious treasons, forged and alleged in the wantonness of that unmotived cruelty which sought his destruction, he had undoubtedly neither the courage to plan, nor, watched as he was, the power to negociate them. The sanguinary tyrants condemned him by the name that belonged to themselves, and the mild and merciful blood they have thus vilely shed,

Does, like the sacrificing Abel's, cry

Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth,

To God and man for justice on their heads.

I thank you for all you say concerning any epitaph on Garrick : yet allow me to assure you that the first idea, which presented itself to my mind, on being asked to write it, was the propriety of avoiding particular description of his theatric talents in deference to the solemnity of epitaph; so that it was not indolence, though it might be misconception, which made me first avoid it; and afterwards, in concurrence with the other alleged reason, produced my unwillingness to add a more characteristic couplet. I cannot help thinking that general criticism would express disgust at specific delineation. Such however is my reverence for Dr. Parr's judgment, that I am disposed to consider the fancied impropriety as an ill-grounded prejudice, which I possess in common with the majority, critics as well as illiterate readers: but in this case, as I observed before, to lengthen would be to ensure that rejection which the attempt will probably meet, even under its conformity to the restrictions