tastes about Weston's beautiful sonnet to Cary and Lister, and about the sweet collection by our pensive young friend, particularly as our general ideas of sonnet-excellence do not quite coincide. That Dr Johnson should dislike the Miltonic sonnet, with its grave energies, and majestic plainness, I do not wonder. Those who, like him, hate blank-verse, are constitutionally insensible of those excellencies; but that you, whose ear. is delightedly familiar with the manly melodies of blank-verse, as Mr F. Warton justly calls them, that you should not love the varying pause, undulating through the lines of the Miltonic sonnet--that you should fancy them rough breaks, astonishes me. I do not, however, despair of your conversion on this point, as I know you have a soul superior to that false shame, which annexes the idea of disgrace to changed opinions, even when their change results from the force of excellence, emerging from the mists of our accidental neglect, or hasty prejudices. The rather do I hope it, as I once held your present ideas on the nature of the sonnet, misled by the gaiety of its title. Mr Boothby, his friend Mr Tighe, Mr Dewes, and Mr Hardinge, are warm admirers of the best of Milton's sonnets; are good judges of English poetry, and masters of the Italian language. Mr Boothby and Mr Tighe

first opened my eyes, or rather put me upon attending to the peculiar excellence of the Miltonic sonnet; and I soon became of their opinion, that it formed a beautiful and distinct order of composition in our language; that dignity and energetic plainness were its most indispensable characteristics. When first Mr Boothby and Mr Tighe began my conversion, I pleaded that the very name demanded gaiety, lightness, and ele gance. They urged, that nothing could be less gay than Petrarch's sonnets; reminded me, that the original meaning of the word monody, no more implied a funeral poem, than the title of sonnet seemed to call for a grave energetic picture of a single thought in fourteen lines; that great writers had a just claim to have their compositions considered as models in every style in which they have excelled; that Milton, having styled his poem, on the death of his friend, a Monody, the name has become appropriate to funeral compositions ;-so also, that his sonnets have annexed an expectation of strength and majesty to that title, which, though sorrow or affectionate. contemplation may soften down, the sonnet must not part with in exchange for any of the lighter graces. This was Boileau's idea concerning the nature of this order of verse. Behold a transla

tion from a passage in him that proves it. I mean, that it should stand the first in my collection, as shewing the principles on which mine have been written. Upon your present system, the numbers will not please you. It is, however, very exactly Boileau's sense and image *.

Cary's sonnets are upon softer subjects than Milton's, and the versification is consequently and properly softer; but they are truly Miltonic, and have nothing of what you say sonnets ought to have," the lightness of a zephyr's wing." The pause, instead of pausing at the end of the line, is often floated into the next, forming those impressive breaks, so dear to the lovers of blank-verse. The language has rather an elevated simplicity than that Popean smoothness and polish, which so highly adorn the heroic and the elegiac measure, but which I cannot think essential, or even an advantage to that of the lyric and the sonnet style. The last Gentleman's Magazine has a fine sonnet of Cary's, translated from the Italian, and a beautiful little poem upon the same subject, from Ovid. It contains also two sonnets of mine, upon which I have been highly complimented by my literary friends. They had been direfully misprinted in the General Evening Post,

K

* See the first sonnet in the Miscellany,-S,

believe

but the Magazine has rectified the errors. I dare will like the ideas, whatever you may think of the numbers.

you

My acquaintance, Mr Sargent, has lately reprinted his Mine, with two additional odes. The first, the Vision of Stone-Henge, we should think sublime, if it were possible to forget Gray's Welch Bard; but servilely imitative, yet, strikingly inferior, we are inclined to quarrel with it. The second ode, Mary Queen of Scots, has much charm for the imagination, and interest for the heart; and, though we find the author there a little too much in debt to Gray, and with high obligations to Ossian, yet has it three or four pictures as original as they are sublime.

There is fine use made of the Ossianic machinery; but you, as well as myself, will quarrel with the disingenuous note upon the very finest passage in the ode, speaking, as it does, with a degree of contempt, of the source whence the author has drawn its sublimity, and containing an insinuation against the originality of Ossian. It is impolitic, as well as disgraceful to his sensibility, which ought to furnish internal evidence of originality, powerful enough to do away all the testimony which Macpherson's disingenuous pretences have thrown into the opposite scale.

How does your beloved Mrs Jackson, whose heart is as warm as her understanding is enlarged? Has time infused its balm into those sorrows which fortitude sustained so nobly?

Adieu, Adieu!

LETTER LXIV.

MRS PIOZZI.

Lichfield, April 11, 1789.

SOON after I had the honour of addressing you last, I obtained the poem Diversity from my tardy bookseller. I confess myself to want taste for that author's general style of writing, though I admire particular passages in him extremely. By the perpetual effort and violence of his style, he loses all sight of nature, simplicity, and perspicuity, till one of his own lines in Diversity becomes his most applicable motto,

"Waging with common sense perpetual war."

Our amiable Miss W.'s poem on the Slave Trade is very dear to me. I am sure you have