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LETTER XLIII.

MISS HELEN WILLIAMS.

Lichfield, Oct. 19, 1788.

AT length, dear Miss W., it is given me to draw your last kind letter from my hoard of epistolary treasures, and to have the pleasure of replying to it.

I have read your glowing poem, in Dr Kippis's Life of Cook, and felt at once thrilled and warmed by its solemn fire. I long for a more intimate acquaintance with its excellence, than one perusal in a society volume enabled me to be. Dr Kippis has, I trust, received my acknowledgment of the favourable mention he has made of my poem, though I smile to see how curiously he guards against either you or me growing too vain on the subject of our poems on Cook,-deploring, as he does, that our hero had no abler panegyrists.

It is only for one eight days that I have ventured to leave my father, since I wrote to you last. A rich festival of oratorio music allured me to Sheffield. My road lay over the wild hills, and through the luxuriant vales of my native Der

byshire. The pleasures I feel from the contemplation of romantic scenery, is there always heightened by the patriot passion. Within a very little way of the village that gave me birth, and of which my dear father is rector, I could not pass it unvisited. But, alas! having never been there before without him, I felt a dreary and painful void as I roved through the unfurnished apartments of the lonely rectory, and saw the rank grass of the bowling-green waving in at the parlour windows. I went into the church, and gazed on the vacant pulpit-ah! how that vacancy struck upon my heart!

I am glad you think so highly of my ingenious and graceful friend Miss ——. If she had loved reading works of real genius as well as you and I do, what might she not have made of her very fine talents! Nobody speaks, and few write, more eloquently; her great desideratum lies in the want of firm and responsible estimation of works of real genius. I have known her praise compositions of the heaviest mediocrity with enthusiasm, and cold and insensible to most admirable compositions.

I am glad you and Dr M. like my Johnsonian conversation. But Mrs K. is curiously dissatisfied with that tract, because it does not record a long theologic dispute, which succeeded to what I

did put down, and in which she ably defended the Quaker principles from the charge of deism and absurdity, which the Doctor brought against them. She fancies that she appears in a poor eclipsed light on this same manuscript, because she there opposes only strong, calm, and general reasoning to the sophistic wit of her antagonist.

I have looked with your eyes on Collins's newfound ode; and I doubt not that you have looked with mine on the sublime graces of the last Birthday Ode. It casts all other birth-day odes into shade. What a delightful compendium does it present us of the history of this nation! I consider the poetic genius of the laureate as very great, -and that his poetic learning is unequalled.

Mrs Piozzi does me much honour in the style in which you tell me she speaks of your friend. She is herself a brilliant and accomplished being, whose praise is fame.

During the progress of this hasty letter, Mr Boswell sent up, from one of our inns, that he would breakfast with me to-morrow morning. He has so much wit, eloquence, and good humour, that it proves right pleasant to converse with him.

Mr S. is engrossed by attendance upon at least two thousand rare plants and flowers, so that his friends lose many hours every week of his com

pany;-hours which they do not like to spare. But his fame as a botanic florist flies far. On the side of Johnson's favourite gigantic willow, and in the bosom of that pretty valley which slopes from the east end of our cathedral, lies his little garden. It is become one of the Lichfield lions which strangers go to see.

Not beginning this letter till past ten, I have borrowed from sleep to prolong it—yet it may be some days ere the packet sets out for town. I wish to write to Mr Gregory. The discriminating manner in which he speaks of my works, is a thousand times more gratifying than any general praise can be. I have received no more power ful stimulus to encounter again the trouble and anxiety of publication than his last letter extends in reviewing my ode to Eliot;-but the visits of distant-dwelling friends passing through this thorough-fare city-those of strangers who procure admissive letters, or messages-nursing;filial stewardship, spiritual, as well as temporal, together with my overgrown correspondence, weigh heavy against the claims of the muses.

Remember me with the kindest thoughts of my heart to the dear Mathias's. I hope they and your mother and sisters are well, in whose obliging recollections I shall be happy to live. Adieu.

LETTER XLIV.

REV. DR GREGORY.

Lichfield, Oct. 30, 1788.

I CONSIDER it one of the highest honours ever conferred upon me, that you should have expunged from your valuable work, a note by Professor Michaelis, in consequence of my comments. It is exalted minds only that we find so condescending......

I feel impelled to meet you, once more, on the ground of Sterne's pretensions to literary fame. It appears to me, upon the most mature deliberation, that few, if any, of the ancient or modern writers have greater claims to originality.

Passing over the notorious imitations of the Latin poets, with Virgil at their head, of the Greek ones, recollect that Shakespeare borrowed almost all his plots, and the outlines of many of his characters from old novels-that Milton was indebted to the Scriptures for his story in the Paradise Lost, and to Homer, Dante, and Ariosto, for the chief features of his supernatural scenes.

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