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It is, perhaps, right to make an exchange of our letters. I promise, upon my honour, to return yours the instant you send me mine ; to return all except the medicinal one, which I must keep to be a check upon my rising pride, when flattery or partiality seeks to persuade me that I am ingenious and respectable.—Adieu !

LETTER XL.

MR NEWTON.

Lichfield, Oct. 12, 1788.

THE disease, which has so malignantly visited yourself and your poor wife, now oppresses me, but with less severity. Ill as I am, and sighing under the pressure of much writing, when all writing is prejudicial to me; yet my heart will not be restrained from assuring you of its sympathy, and of its hope, that health and peace are, by this time, re-established in your mansion.

Never was your imagination more lovely than in the letter before me, notwithstanding its mourning raiment. It places me by you upon the heathbush, on the sunny-side of one of my native moun

tains. The particular names, so familiar to my recollection, of the hills, the cliffs, the woods, and the valleys, which form that wide landscape, then stretched before you, brought it to my eye with many a thrill of affectionate pleasure:

"He sang of Tay, of Forth, and Clyde,
The hills and dales around;

Of Leader Haughs, and Yarrow Side,
O how I blest the sound!"

Some of my hours have passed pleasantly away since we parted, in the society of dear Mr and Mrs Whalley, who came to see me in September. The former, engaged in building, and in opening a little Edenic habitation, in a bloomy wilderness, could stay only a week; but the latter was my guest during three. She is a pleasing rational companion, infinitely estimable, though genius may not have infused her ideas, as those of her husband, in its etherial dyes.

My poor father has twice, within these seven weeks, been re-visited by his terrible convulsion fits, yet recovered from each of these attacks in a few days. On the 17th of this month, please God he lives to see it, his 80th year will be completed. Scarce less than a miracle his living to see it, so often as, in the course of the last eight,

the dart of death has been shook over his feeble frame.

My father being quite as well as usual while Mr and Mrs Whalley were with us, you will imagine, that it was a golden week. I introduced our young poets to him, Cary and Lister, of whom he thus writes, in a letter I received from him yesterday :-"Have you seen the reserved and pensive Cary, since I left you? He is a very extraordinary lad, strongly marked in manners, as well as mind, by the hand of genius. His total freedom from ostentation, and severe kind of simplicity, are uncommon features at any, and much more at his age, in a nation so immersed in luxury, vanity, vice, and varnished manners, as is England now. Dear lovely little Lister! I hope he will conquer that unfortunate impediment in his speech, and be enabled to pursue the shining path open to his fine abilities, and thirst of literary acquirements.”

Indeed they are charming youths; yet is there one thing that I could wish otherwise in both of them,-an aptness to decide too arrogantly against general opinion, to take whimsical aversions to beautiful writers, and of established fame in their own.science. They assert, that Pope had little natural genius, and that his splendid graces were

the creation of art alone. I wonder and exclaim at them both in vain. Such prejudices, in such minds, are, to me, the most unaccountable things in nature. They deify Dryden, who, with all the riches of his invention, and often beautiful numbers, is, in my opinion, thrown much below Pope, by his slovenly vulgarities, and wild absurdities.

There is a sonnet of unmatched beauty in the last Gentleman's Magazine, addressed to Cary and Lister. It has the same initials, J. W., with that sublime poem in my praise in the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1784. I have little doubt that Mr Hayley is the author of both.

I do not believe Lister ever sent you his charming sonnet addressed to yourself. Behold it :

"Newton, whose soft and sweetly varied strain
Enchants the raptur'd sense, what power divine
Taught thee, dear bard, the blooming wreaths to twine,
Cull'd from fair poesy's luxuriant plain

With art so lovely!-Not the pensive swain

Musaeus, favo'rite of the tuneful nine,

Wak'd purer melody. Thou bright shalt shine
The boast, the wonder of the laurell'd train :
Thou, who wert born the arduous paths to explore
Of steep Parnassus; from its mazy ways
Dauntless to pluck the golden-vested flower,
Chaste reputation; nor shall that fierce ray,
Shot from malignant Envy's glaring eye,
Or tarnish, or embrown its glowing dye."

LETTER XLI.

H. REPTON, Esq.

Lichfield, Oct. 14, 1788.

I SHOULD Suppose nobody has ever been so well qualified as yourself for the profession you purpose to assume, that of landscape gardener; I mean who has ever taken it up, skilled, as you have long been, in all its scientific branches, and possessing, as you do, the poet's feeling and the painter's eye.

Neither acquaintance nor connection have I with Mr Mason, the tuneful and accomplished master of the art you profess. I have, however, found a channel of conveyance to him, for one of those beautiful proofs of ability, to execute the task you undertake. My poetic friend, Mr Whalley, is intimate with a bosom friend of Mr Mason's, and that is my channel. Mr W. has also engaged to disperse three or four more of these landscapes amongst nabobs and purchasers of new situations, who may happen to fall in his way, and who may wish to see an Eden opening in their wilderness;

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