Have you reflected, that the most brilliant and celebrated of Dryden's works (his noble Ode excepted) are paraphrastic translations from Chaucer, &c. Neither he nor Pope have one original poem so rich in poetic invention, that first gift of the muses, as Hayley's Triumphs of Temper. Then, what stuff has Dryden left amidst his excellencies, what bombast ?-What tame did and do prosing!-What wretched conceits!

My ear seldom quarrels with the imperfect rhymes in any situation. I find them in the most harmonious verses of Dryden, Pope, Gray, Mason, Collins, Beattie, &c. which seem not the less musical for their admission. With regard to the other circumstances that concur to form the polish and sweetness of numbers, I would have no author spare his pains to procure them. Unpolished verse is much more apparently laborious, than where art has been skilfully applied. Let us apply it, therefore, as assiduously as possible, always remembering, however, that the music of numbers is a subordinate excellence, to which sense and picture ought never to be sacrificed. If to present them with an high degree of strength or grace, is only to be done by dispensing with a little hardness in the measure, an hiatus, or an unpleasant alliteration, we should sacrifice the less to the greater excellence; nor, in that case, mind

a defect that respects the sound merely, unless the measure is absolutely broken, and the ancient and established rules of versification infringed. And so terminates the history of my ideas concerning the duties a poet owes to the formation of his numbers.

LETTER LI.

MRS HAYLEY.

Lichfield, Jan. 11, 1789.

You inquire, dearest Madam, my opinion of Mr Hayley's Revolution Ode. His return home has doubtless furnished you with them, for to him did I ingenuously breathe them, as they arose on my first perusals. Amidst the much that I found to admire, the most material of my few objections Dr Warner has obviated, by communicating the new discovery of the Tornado-its dispersing upon any sharp-pointed steel being presented to it. This discovery leaves the simile, and its application, one of the most beautiful and perfect passages English poetry can boast.

Why, I wonder, will Nichols disgrace his ma

gazine by admitting such impudent fool's-head criticisms, as appear in his last, on this ode of the bard's?-a fellow who tells Mr Hayley, that though force is synonymous to strength in the French language, it is not in ours. Johnson would have taught the puppy better, whose whole letter proves that he ought not to budge a foot out of the dictionary leading-strings.

I will not disobey you, my dear Mrs Hayley, and, after the example of the bard, who often passes over in silence my request to know his opinions on popular compositions, be dumb to your inquiring after my opinion of Emeline; yet had I rather you had not questioned me, since I cannot be disingenuous, and cannot suffer the pleasing bribe in Mr Hayley's last lines to influence my judgment. The scenic descriptions in the first volume pleased me extremely; but I confess that was all which pleased me in the course of the work. It is a weak and servile imitation of Cecilia, and I have seldom felt more wearied, or less interested than by the personages of this vapid drama. Early in its perusal, I felt disgusted by the manners of the heroine, which, in her situation, it was so utterly impossible she should have acquired. Emeline's advantages were infinitely fewer than Caroline's de Lichfield. The old canoness had once lived about court, and,

though romantic and indiscreet, her address could not be supposed to be deficient in the exterior forms of politeness; yet, even under that consideration, and that also of her having passed three months at Court, the authoress of Caroline judiciously gives to her heroine's first manners that wild, artless, engaging simplicity, of which we find nothing in Emeline. It is the last thing we can dispense with in her who had conversed only with peasants, excepting one honest, yet inelegant, old woman; an old steward, as homespun; and a vulgar-minded cunning attorney.

No intuitive strength of understanding, no possible degree of native sensibility, could have enabled her to acquire the "do me honour" language of high-life, and all the punctilious etiquette of its proprieties, with which she receives the old and young lord at the castle.

Nor was I less disgusted with the unfeeling indelicacy with which Adelaide, in the detail of her humiliating story, talks about her caps and feathers, and the admiration which was paid to her elegance in dress, and to the beauty of her person.

The ardent passion and reformation of Edwards, appear to me wholly incompatible with that libertine callousness with which he is represented in the first volumes.

I have always been told, that Mrs Smith designed, nay that she acknowledges, the characters of Mrs and Mr Stafford to be drawn for herself and her husband.

Whatever may be Mr Smith's faults, surely it was as wrong as indelicate to hold up the man, whose name she bears, the father of her children, to public contempt in a novel.

Then how sickening is the boundless vanity with which Mrs Smith asserts that herself, under the name of Mrs Stafford, is " a woman of firstrate talents, cultivated to the highest-possible degree."

So far from giving proofs of these self-imputed, peerless talents, Mrs Stafford does not speak a single word, does not write one letter, to which moderate talents, with a but tolerable education, might not be competent.

The parade the author makes with her knowledge of a language, in which every boardingschool miss is instructed; the frippery of its interlarded phrases, and her frequent vulgarisms in our own language, combined to make me dislike the style, as much as I had disliked the unnatural manner in which several of the characters are drawn. At the conversational vulgarisms, I own I wonder extremely, as Mrs Smith's poetry, though