fidelity, are, amidst an ostentatious display of moral exertions, wondrous prone to neglect and defy the claims of obvious duties.

Did you hear Mr Jephson speak Mr Hayley's charming Ode on the centennial birth-day of English liberty? What would I not have given to have heard it?

I groan over the coldness of our beautiful city-to whom inanimate nature has been so bounteous, sensibility so much a niggard-where genius is neglected, and the blessings of liberty unvalued.

While the rest of the nation lifted up the voice of thanksgiving-while every neighbouring town, and even village, gave some testimony of commemorating gratitude, no flowing bowls passed round the tables of our thankless citizens :

"No festal dances-no harmonious songs!"

Do they not deserve to be transplanted from their fertile and sylvan fields,

"Into some grave and foggy air,
Where mountain-zephyr never blew;
To marshy levels, lank, and bare,
Which Pan, which Ceres never knew:
Where sleeps a pale discolour'd sea
Upon the low and reedy shore."

We have a genius of luxuriant blossom in our neighbourhood, of the name of Cary. He has a Lichfieldian friend of the same age, whose name

is Lister, and who writes verses almost as well. The following sonnet, which I think exquisite, was written and addressed to them by a self-taught bard, organist of Solihul in Warwickshire :

To MESSRS CARY AND LISTER.

SONNET.

YET, yet your unpolluted stores with-hold,
Bright buds of genius, bursting into day!
Spite of propitious Phœbus' cheering ray,
Parnassian climes are chilling, chilling cold.
In vain ye glad th' enamour'd breeze, unfold
In vain your rich luxuriant foliage, gay
With orient hues-that, blushing, ye display
Tyre's bloom imperial, streak'd with Ophir's gold!
Nor scent, nor beauty,-trust the warning verse,
Unconscious hapless pair! shall ought avail;
Envy, th' expanding blossom's cankering curse,
Shall gnaw,-detraction's instant blight assail
Your shrinking forms, and sportive scorn disperse
Your wither'd honours to the sighing gale.

Notwithstanding this sweet pensive warning, Cary has just published a set of sonnets, which I ardently wish may sell and be admired. Some of them are highly beautiful, others want the chissel a little. Adieu.

LETTER XLVII.

MISS WESTON.

Lichfield, Nov. 25, 1788.

No, dear Sophia, I could not possibly consider you as a letter in my debt, well aware that I was in yours for many an interesting and eloquent page. It was my intention soon to have made

you

the bankrupt's offer of a shilling in the pound, -all I can, beneath the consciousness of being unable, with my pen, to afford you any sort of recompense for the inroads which its useless diffuseness would make upon your leisure.

Without any reason to think that your letters are not delightful to me, you profess to dislike writing. I know how your time must be engrossed, so that it would be infatuation in me to

persevere in my former habits of wearying you with dissertations, since the mill-horse round of my existence deprives my pen of those resources which pour in, on every side, upon yours.

If you think me unreasonable in imputing Mr H's long silences and short letters to chilled and faded regard, who knows my avidity for his epistles; surely, Sophia, you have no reason to consider the shortness or infrequency of mine in that light, who declared to me, that the only letters you liked were those for which, possessing neither wit nor humour, my powers of intellect are not responsible. However, in my letter of April the 15th, I sent you a singular portrait of a Being, who bears your name, and which, I thought, might have engaged your attention; but you took no notice of it when you wrote to me in reply.

It was not right in Miss W. to tell Mr of the hint I had given concerning the aguish-disposition of his affections. The letter of her's to which that of mine replied, mentioned, with a visible sense of pain, that when he was last in town, he only left his name at her door. It is natural to feel some degree of comfort under mortifications of this sort, from a knowledge that others are fellow-sufferers with us. Beneath the influence of that idea, I told her the too great reason I had

to fear he was not slandered by an imputed tendency to grow tired of his friends, if they were not useful to him in his literary business.

There is surely a mistake about Mr

re

fusing to meet D—, since I know they are intimate friends. I both wonder at, and am sorry for, his thus refusing the desires of other ingenious men to see and converse with him. It wears a cold ungrateful appearance, and certainly retards the popularity of his glorious writings. 'Tis very strange!—If he had not conversational powers, or if he were personally unpleasing, there would be less wonder; but he, of whose countenance, grace of figure, address, and polished insinuation of manners, your glowing description is no flattered portrait-why should he be thus unkindly repellant? I am very glad you have been favoured with an interview; at his own request too!but you must not impute to my influence a distinction so flattering. I was no other way instrumental in your obtaining it, than by giving him a just portrait of you. He is a gallant man, and would not refuse, for once at least, to gratify a charming woman's longing.

The mutual guess of yourself and your fair friend was not erroneous. The two essays you mentioned, Clarissa defended against Cumber