yet more and more, every day, thy baleful influence!

"Give me the man that's not enslav'd by thee,
And I will wear him in my heart's core."

I did, indeed, stare to hear you quote my opinions upon Lee's play, Alexander, uttered so many years back. Little did I think, when I gave them, that an eaglet's eye was upon my criticism. Adieu! Adieu!

LETTER XXXI.

REV. MR FITZTHOMAS, on his Vindication of GRAY from the envious Strictures of JOHNSON.

Lichfield, July 9, 1788.

SIR-PERMIT me to return you my most animated thanks, for the perusal of a pamphlet, ingenious, learned, eloquent, generous, and convincing. That I had not previously seen it, that its reputation had not reached me, affords melancholy proof that we live in an age, in which fine writing, however abundantly produced, passes

away without its fame, and that there is little literary appetite amongst the general race of readers, except for politics, and for literary or personal defamation. In the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1783, I addressed an anonymous copy of verses to Mason, reproaching him for want of duty to his departed friend, in not rescuing his fame

"From the Philistine critic, who defies
The chosen armies of the heavenly muse."

You have stretched the giant at your feet, who had certainly vowed to raise a pile to the snaky. goddess, formed of laurels torn from the brows of the English poets. But, alas! that too prevalent desire in human nature, to see the illustrious degraded, gives to the Johnsonian criticisms the power which Antaeus received from touching his mother-earth.

Mr H. Seward represses my hopes to possess what I should esteem a gem of my cabinet, by telling me that this pamphlet, which ought to be engraved in golden letters, is out of print, and that this copy, which you have given me the happiness of perusing, is your only one. Will you have the goodness to permit my detaining it a little while longer, that I may read it to the few,

alas! too few in this place, or among my more distant visitors, who are ingenious enough, and sufficiently unprejudiced by the sophisms of the envious dogmatist, to feel its excellence. I will take the utmost care of it, and have already commissioned a literary friend to try if it is possible to procure it for me.

*

Mr Potter's Vindication of Gray's Odes had pleased me extremely, but your's is of prior publication; and I can truly say, it appears to me even more full and complete. You dispute with Johnson every inch of ground, and totally subdue wherever you assail. I am, Sir, yours, &c.

Lichfield, July 19, 1788.

I AM extremely flattered, and anew delighted, my dear ingenious Cary, by the poetic tribute with which you have honoured my Horatian Odes. Except Anacreon, Horace is certainly the gayest

*Now the Rev. H. Cary, the ingenious translater of Danté, vicar of Kingsbury, near Tamworth. 1810.

and lightest of the lyric poets. You say he has not a Pindaric feather in his wing. To me he often appears to have flashes of sublimity, at least, along the course of his odes. They frequently shone upon me through the dim veil of a literal prose translation ;-but it is my creed, that verseliterality draws off all the spirit of an author. It was the creed of Dryden and Pope-as is evident from their always infusing a portion of new and original matter into their translations.

I could not, at the time, quite accede to your objection to the expression, " jocund scorn,” in a poem of mine. We as often see scorn gaily, as gloomily expressed. Dipping, since we parted, into my favourite Pleasures of the Imagination, by Akenside, I found the following line, which has an expression synonymous to that of mine, which you disliked,

"Where gay derision bends her hostile aim."

My favourite word "yellow," of more than Italian liquidness, except when it is spoiled by the vulgar pronunciation yallow, and which has such a picturesque glow on the imagination, is as frequent in Thomson, as you say the word " bowers" is in my writings. If "bowers" is a word of infinite convenience in rhyme, Milton, however, uses it, through

the Paradise Lost, not less lavishly, though blank verse calls not for it with the same pressing necessity. Adieu!

LETTER XXXIII.

MRS KNOWLES.

Lichfield, August 29, 1788.

ON my return home from my late excursion into Derbyshire, I found your kind letter, which dear George had brought, when he found its bowery mansion deserted of its mistress.

Soul-exalting music, and the glad welcome of several friends, unseen during some of the late years, recompensed the exertion and anxiety of a being, so stationary as your Anna, divided from her feeble parent, whose life, dear to her peace, hangs by a line slight and attenuated as the spider's thread.

Within a mile of my native village, I could not resist the temptation of ascending the rocks amongst which it winds.

Though I found several valued old acquaintance in its mansions, who seemed thrice glad to