parading with a request, which I trust he knows me incapable of granting. Too perfect is my confidence in the unerring aim, and in the sharpness of your darts, to shoot in your strong bow, I promise you.

I long to see your two translations of the Latin poem on the Woodmen of Arden, being fully conscious of Mr Morfitt's responsibility for all the classic excellence you tell me it possesses. I wish every translator of beautiful Greek, Latin, and Italian poetry, knew as well as yourself how to transfer its gold, unalloyed by any dross in the process.

e;

You are too hard upon Mason's Ode on the Revolution. The felicity of the egotism with which it is extreme opens, the exordium is superior to Mr Hayley's on the same subject; yet, on the whole, I think Hayley's ode the richer in poetic matter. Both of them are surely the evident works of great masters, though by no means the greatest of their works.

I cannot say I have read, but I have glanced over parts of Mason's Life of Whitehead, and felt myself often pleased and interested. Let me know what it is for which you will never forgive him. Surely his ridicule upon that malicious tyrant, Johnson, both as an author and a man,

will not prove the never-to-be-pardoned sin. You know I think with you about the abilities, and about the style of the despot; but, strange as it may seem to us, many men of first-rate talents, with Mr Hayley at their head, think his style turgid and laboured. If they sincerely think so, where is the crime of avowing their opinion? They like Addison's Capillaire better than Johnson's Burgundy; but remember, that Johnson has, in his Lives of the Poets, praised the dead smallbeer of Blackmore's imagination, and abused the nectared streams of Gray's.

Both of your sonnets please me too well to allow my contending with you for the palm of comparative transcendency respecting either. Perhaps that addressed to me has more genius, that to Cary and Lister more grace. It is said to be an excellence in a sonnet, to have but one thought. These same sonnets appear to me as a couple of beautiful rings,—one a cluster of sapphires, amethysts, and diamonds, the other, a large single brilliant, of the first water.

Nichols has certainly made the worst possible arrangement of our sonnets. It is like putting a man and his wife to dance together at a ball; and his knowing that yours was written so many months before mine, increases the impropriety of

their appearing together. Yours should not have been printed before the letter, which referred to it, could be admitted. But never mind it; printed remonstrance will but call attention more forcibly to what is made to seem so very a bow and curtsey. Adieu!

LETTER L.

MR WESTON.

Lichfield, Jan. 7th, 1789.

As to my anger, whatever my wonder may be at your strong prejudices in favour of my muse, and against the sweet Swan of Twickenham, anger is out of the question. It would be affectation, in the first instance, in the last injustice; for have you not a right to assert your own opinions, whatever they may be? I, however, devoutly wish, that, for your own sake and mine, you would greatly soften the hyperbole of your praise of me, and the warmth of your censure upon Pope, since there is such an inevitably

large majority of opinions against yours in both instances.

I

Mr Morfit's fragment has great beauty. am pleased and flattered by the similarity in its leading idea to that of my rural sonnet.

Why do you fancy that it was Dr Johnson's blindness to the merits of some of my favourite writers, that produced my conviction concerning the rancour of his spirit?

It appears to me, that you are as unjust to Pope, and to the collective merit of modern poets, as Johnson is to those of almost every poet he depreciates; yet nobody ever heard me reflect upon the general expansion and goodness of your heart.

But perusing, with unprejudiced judgment, the records of his malevolence, given by his friends, that fancy it was, in him, great to be abusive, who can think Johnson's heart a good one?

In the course of many years' personal acquaintance with him, I never knew a single instance in which the praise (from another's lip) of any human being, excepting that of Mrs Thrale, was not a caustic on his spirit; and this, whether their virtues or abilities were the subject of encomium.

VOL. II.

What a strange power has prejudice, since it can strike such a mind as yours so blind, as to make you fancy Pope little more than a brilliant versifier, because he successfully endeavoured to polish his numbers high. If ingenious allusions, striking and graceful imagery, sound, perspicuous, and pointed good sense were not, in happy succession, to be found throughout his writings, their beautiful harmonies would be of trivial import to me. Exalted, however, as I think the claims of Pope, I do not place him on any level with Shakespeare and Milton.

Dr Johnson's opinions of poetry are so absurd and inconsistent with each other, that, though almost any of his dogmas may be clearly and easily confuted, yet the attempt is but combating an hydra-headed monster.

Pope's indiscriminate aversion to the Alexandrine verse is as ill-judged as Dryden's licentious use of it. In the lyric measure, it gives great dignity to the close of a stanza, if its cesura is properly placed. In the couplet-measure, it also gives energy and grace to the close of a passage; but its effect appears to me always bad, when I like the placed in the middle of a sentence. sense to overflow the couplet, as you ingeniously express it, oftener than it ever does in Pope and Johnson.