politeness to insert it in exactly the place it stands.

Adieu !

LETTER LIII.

WILLIAM HAYLEY, ESQ.

Lichfield, Jan. 29, 1789.

ALAS! my dear Bard, to how many of your friends has this year been fatal. With grief I now see the mournful list swelled by the name of Miers. He was a Being in whom genius, benevolence, and modesty were conspicuously blended. The celebrated Wyatt seems the twin spirit of poor Miers.

Inclosed you will find a transcript of my Runic dialogue. The imperfect rhymes will I fear offend you, and yet I confess myself incorrigible on that head. Mingling occasionally with the more perfect ones, they relieve my ear, as in music it is relieved by the intermixture of discords. It seems impossible to banish them, even considering them as blemishes, without sacrificing to an excellence so very subordinate the higher graces of poetry. Pope and Gray, in whose

works they occur so often, must have used them upon deliberation, and by free choice, as not thinking them defects; else, taking such confessed pains to polish, and perfect their poetry, we may be assured they would have banished the rhyme of less complete jingle.

Mr Cary is very grateful for the kind interest you take in his peace, and in his fame, and beyond measure gratified that you have been pleased with his sonnets. Since our first acquaintance I have assiduously endeavoured to instil the just and necessary cautions your letter breathes; but the slow sale which you mention, of a poem of that eminence, must give them irresistible weight. It is a circumstance which verifies the indignant prophecy of my spirit, on first reading Johnson's Lives of the Poets. I foresaw that the contempt, with which so many of the most exalted in that tribe are there treated by an author, whom the nation at large seems to consider as oracular, would, like the Gothic clouds, spread a night over the English Parnassus, which might probably darken, till no degree of genius, however splendid, should be able to pierce it.

I confess, my dear Bard, that in the prefatory sonnet to Mr Cary's publication, I wished, and designed to combat the doctrine, held out by Mrs Smith, in her preface to the first edition of her

sonnets, viz. that the legitimate sonnet is not suited to the genius of our language. Now that same true-born sonnet is, with me, a very favourite branch of poetry. The best of Milton's, I have always thought, formed the model for sonnet-writing, which, demanding the gracefully undulating pauses of blank verse, happily blends the nature of blank verse with that of rhyme. Its name seems to call for light composition; not so its nature, if Petrarch and Milton may be allowed to have understood it. Mrs Smith's have the gravity, but appear to me deficient in every other characteristic of that order of verse. I have seen the legitimate sonnet exquisitely beautiful, not only from yours, but from various pens.

Reproving me for not liking Mrs Smith's sonnets, and trying to enlist my vanity against my want of taste for them, makes me fear that my dear Bard suspects me of speaking rather from grudging spleen, than from involuntary opinion. He has never had cause to think me capable of envious coldness. That lady's opinion of my works, if indeed she professes to like them, does me honour, but cannot change the nature of my perceptions.

that

Mrs Smith's versification is melodious-but appears to me a subordinate excellence in poetry. I do not find in her sonnets any original

4

ideas, any vigour of thought, any striking imagery-but plagiarism, glaring and perpetual ;— whole lines taken verbatim, and without acknowledgment from Shakespeare, Milton, Young, Pope, Gray, Collins, Mason, and Beattie.

When I see an author reduced to crib an whole line from Young's Night Thoughts, another whole line from Mason's Elegy on Lady Coventry, and two whole lines from Shakespeare, to make up a little poem, which contains only fourteen lines, I cannot help concluding that the imagination is barren. Yet is it even so with the eighth sonnet in Mrs Smith's first edition.

I have not seen the second edition, but am told that she has in that put the quotation marks so disingenuously withheld in the first publication. She has there, among many other plagiarisms, as notorious, given this line as her own,

"And drink delicious poison from her eyes."

But if, after all, you sincerely think there is genuine poetic genius in Mrs Smith's sonnets, you should not condemn in me, as illiberal, a contrary opinion, recollecting the wide extremes of Gray and Mason's ideas, on Ossian's Poetry, and on Rousseau's Eloisa.

Giovanni is, I hope, recovering, and my aged

nursling has wonderfully well sustained the late cutting blasts. They were, I apprehend, more welcome to your peculiar constitution, than milder gales.

I have great delight in the information concerning your improving health, and have observed, that when the vital light has been clouded and inauspicious through youth, it often grows permanently clear and serene, as life advances. So be it with my dear bard !-Adieu ! Adieu !

LETTER LIV.

MRS KNOWLES.

Lichfield, Feb. 1, 1789.

AND what becomes of my brilliant Mrs Knowles? I long for her spirited and ever-eloquent remarks, upon the sudden, barefaced, disgraceful adoption of Tory principles, by those who so lately affected to triumph in the blessings of the Revolution.

And how goes on the combination between