Adieu! Do not think me quite a fury, and do more than think, be assured, that I must have real and lasting cause of resentment, ere I cease to be your sincere friend and servant-A. S.

LETTER XXIX.

MR NEWTON.

Lichfield, June 19, 1788.

AMIDST the late and present terrible wreck of commercial credit, I shuddered to think of the dangers to which you might have been exposed. Though your last proves, alas! that my fears have not been wholly groundless, and paints the penury and distress of thousands, consequent upon this wide-spreading mischief; yet there is comfort in the hope you give me, that your establishment is not ruinously drawn into the vor

tex.

On the other hand, I am grieved to find that, to the inevitable anxieties of such a fearful crisis, domestic sorrow has been superadded. The month, elapsed since the date of that letter, I trust, brought better health into your family.

All you say upon the former mortality amongst your children, is wise and just. Heaven often proves as kind in the seeming blessings it takes from us, as in the real ones it bestows,

Mr S., and his amiable daughter united with me in anxiety for your fafety, amid this world of insolvency. It is the great objection to commercial undertakings, that neither a man's honesty, industry, or even prudence, can preserve him from the perils to which they are liable.

Thank God, my father remains much as when you saw him last. During the too glowing weather, he went out, in his little coach, morning and evening. Till yesterday's rain, nothing was ever more arid than our fields. Scanty, I fear, will be the hay-harvest.

Mr Hayley is much pleased with your poem to G. Ayre, and with your presenting it to him. His last letter commissions me with acknowledgments to you. With it travelled a very elegant composition, in verse, of the classical and brilliant Mr G. H's. The Bard of Eartham, in commenting upon them both, speaks decidedly in favour of the poetic genius of your poem.

I have spoken to you of Mr Hayley's noble adoption of a friendless youth of genius, of the name of Howel; that he himself added geography, French, Italian, and fencing, to the consi

derable classic learning the boy had brought from Westminster school; that he procured him a commission; that Howel had behaved gallantly in the East; that his letters to his illustrious benefactor, were patterns of eloquent gratitude, and ingenious observation. All these things you know. About five weeks since, Mr Hayley went up to London, glowing with affectionate expectation of embracing the hero, "with all his blushing honours thick upon him." Alas! instead of this expected happiness, the direful tidings met him, that Howel had perished in the shoreless waters!

The dear bard is returned back to Eartham, to shed the bitter tears of sorrow and disappointment.

Adieu! my friend-how often, alas, is anguish the portion of the elevated and the good!

LETTER XXX.

H. CARY, Esq.

Lichfield, July 1, 1788.

HEAVENS! my dear Cary, is it a poet, a young, an ingenuous, an ardent poet, that condemns Mason for speaking with contempt of the malignant calumniator of his friend's poetic fame!-As to the plea that it was ungenerous to speak of a deceased contemporary with disdain, it is wholly invalidated by the observation, that Gray was deceased when Johnson shed canker spots upon his laurels.

Every month that rolled on, after the publication of the Lives of the Poets, rendered me more and more impatient of Mason's forbearance. I reproached him for it in some stanzas, printed in. the Gentleman's Magazine for October (as I think) 1785.

So far, therefore, from being impossible, as you rashly aver, to palliate Mason's avowed contempt of Johnson, in his Life of Whitehead, it will appear amply justified, not only in Mr Hayley's eyes and mine, but in those of every person

who is not a partial idolater of the greatest enemy the poetic science ever had, or ever can have; one, who has already, by his frontless sophistry, brought it into a degree of disgrace, fatal to the expectations of its rising votaries. They must be vain, indeed, who can hope to please a race of readers, that have been taught, by Johnson, to look down upon the Lycidas of Milton, the sportive warblings of Prior, and upon the Odes of Gray.

Little do poets understand their own interest, or that of their science, who deem it unworthy to speak with scorn of its proud defamer.

To me there appears no middle path to be adopted with any rationality, after having read the Lives of the Poets, but either we must perceive and despise the envy and injustice of their author, or believe that there is little or no English poetry worth reading.

I hope and trust, my dear Cary, that the time will come when witty sarcasm, and splendid periods will no longer have power to dazzle your judgment against the claims of your predecessors, and to make you fancy that none have a right to speak as freely of Johnson, as he spoke of others, who were even greater in point of genius than himself. O prejudice! how do I live to deplore