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writing about the powers and properties of nature, and the discoveries of science.

So the brilliant Sophia is commenced Babylonian. You and she will, I hope, often meet, now that you are in each others sphere of attraction. There is powerful magnetism on both sides.

I am glad to hear your George is well, and has scientific ambition; it is the best terrene aspiration in the mind of a wealthy youth.

Oratory is sporting nice fire-works in Westminster-hall; heating her furnace of philippics pure hot-but Hastings will walk through it safe as old Shadrach, and his cousins of the Meshech and Abednego family, Clive, Sykes, and Rumbold.

Those at the helm, that, from time to time, invest frail mortals with the power of wading to gold and gems through human blood, take care against the hour of their being called over the coals, to provide them with a jerkin of the asbestos material. Adieu. Your's faithfully.

LETTER XIX.

GEORGE HARDINGE, ESQ.

Lichfield, April 25, 1788.

Look at the date of the inclosed letter. It will shew you, that no friend of later years has a right to reproach my silence, since that letter replies to one which I received from Mrs Knowles, last Christmas-day, with whom I have maintained the most intimate connection from my earliest youth. No shade of chagrin ever passed over our amity; yet are we each of high and independent spirit, and by no means see every object of genius, literature, and conduct, in the same light. But then, we hold our minds open to conviction; and neither of us fancy that greater and wiser people than ourselves must necessarily have violated that greatness and that wisdom, when, ever they acted, or spoke, or wrote contrary to our ideas of" the first good, first perfect, and first fair."

. When Catiline said, that to like the same things constituted friendship, he could not mean that perfect coincidence which never really ex

isted between two human beings; and which if, through pusillanimous affectation, it appears to exist, must give to the social intercourse, whether by the fire-side, or on paper, the tediousness of solitude. Meaning no more, by his observation, than a general congeniality of tastes and sentiments, I am inclined to be of his opinion, presupposing that there is honesty of heart on both sides; without which, the characters of friendship are written in sand, amidst every possible congeniality of pursuits.

If certain flattering declarations in your last had any ground of probability, and chance and inclination had inmeshed you and me in the inextricable net, we must have been better humoured than dear Old Sublimity and wife, in the days of Cromwell and Charles, if we had not soon scrambled as far asunder as that same net would permit; for, it must be confessed, we do see a few things in strangely differing lights. Politics, however, could not have been a source of dispute, if, indeed, you are a staunch whig, for I love not toryism of any species. Pray, recollect, friend of mine, who art so given to use the word insist, that toryism may pervade verbal opinions as well as political ones; and that all our con

* Milton.

tests have been not with my opinion against yours; but, inferred from their practice, the opinion of many ingenious against that of one ingenious person.

Your friend's letter is very animated. I love every species of enthusiasm ; but a noble mind loses ground with me a little, when I see it employ its energies upon the arts, while they slumber fastidiously over the higher exertions of intellect.

This observation refers to the glow over the statue of Apollo, in a former letter of his; a glow which I have never seen from his pen over any poet of any age or country. Painting and statuary are imitations-poetry is creation; and when she "gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name," and that in her happiest manner, there must be some defect in the understanding, if it pays not its first and most ardent devotion at her shrine. However, I wish success to this gentleman's benevolent exertions, and fair befal your eloquence to speed it!

If I had leisure for the muses, which I have not,-if I had spirits, which I have not, to encounter the solicitudes of publication;-and if I thought, which I do not, that poetry could have any influence upon our senators to induce them to espouse the cause of liberty and mercy, in behalf

of the negroes, I would demand if Africa has no benevolent genius ?—if her nymphs and her rivergods are all besmeared with blood! I would make the Naiads of Niger and Gambia complain of the human gore which pollutes their waves. I would try if I could not rummage out some black muses, some sooty graces, to sit upon the topmost stone of an high African mountain, listening to the groans of a thousand nations. I would make an execration from a sable river-god to a ship loaded with slaves, crammed together in its hold, whose groans and cries should, at intervals, like the sound of the death-bell in Mason's beautiful Elegy on Lady Coventry, interrupt the execration, or be a kind of returning chorus to it.

That execration should be something like the Roman augur's to the legions of Crassus. I would call upon the Genius of England to remember what lustre the improved humanity of building hospitals, &c. has cast around his civic crown, and conjure him, by casting away the galling, and hitherto indissoluble chain, from the naked savage, toiling for him beneath torrid suns, to open a prospect of golden days to come,

"Where the swart negroes, 'mid their palmy groves, Might quaff the citron juice, and woo their sable loves."

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