lic prints of that era, with my name affixed to them.

One of the notes to the part which the Doctor has just published, induces me to believe he retains his design of opening his first part with my sketch of the valley. Surely he judges wrong; so great a work ought not to contain lines, especially in the exordium, which are known to have been written by another.

In the year 1781, Dr Darwin married a young, lovely, and rich widow, who allured him to quit Lichfield and settle at Derby. Since that period I have seldom seen him, though he comes often to our city on medical visits. Now and then he writes to me, when the some-time poetical preceptor deigns to consult his pupil about the texture of his splendid web.

To embellish it, he has called in the aids of extraneous allusion, description, and imagery from all sciences, and all arts, and from the mythological machinery of all religions. As a work which applies to the imagination chiefly, it is perhaps one of the first in our language. He has certainly procured some ingenious friend or friends to fabricate the various reviews of this poem which have appeared in the public prints. The hireling critics, left to themselves, we should have seen very different strictures; for I am told this work

is praised with taste and discrimination, as if it was felt and understood:

Adieu!

"Cou'd they do this?

We know their handy-work."

LETTER LXXVIII.

MRS MOмPESSAN.

Lichfield, August 9, 1789.

ALAS! dear friend, my poor father's convulsive attacks, always so perilous, and coming upon him with added frequency, I dare not leave him. Devoting myself so long to the tender and interesting duties of preserving, to my utmost power, his aged and feeble frame from pain and danger, I must not quit the filial post, now that the calls for maintaining it become more and more pressing. Therefore is it that my visits to your bower must, at present, be only ideal. Ideal visits I often pay you, see you posting round your sylvan walks, or sitting netting in your parlour, and thinking of

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your absent friends. Truly sorry am I to learn how those kind meditations have of late been embittered by your sister Heathcote's alarming indisposition. May she soon be relieved from its dangers, and restored to that health which I so sincerely wish may be enjoyed by all who are near and dear to you!

Mr Burden will be a treasure to our little city, if he perseveres in his intention of becoming its inhabitant. I will not promise that our fine people shall value him for his intellectual superiorities, or taste for the arts; but there are a few of us who know how to estimate them, and since he has an easy fortune, and plays at cards, he will be welcome even to those who like nobody the better for being more enlightened than themselves.

Nothing, however, is more difficult to obtain than habitations in Lichfield for new settlers. As I conclude Mr Burden is a single man, he would doubtless wish ready-furnished lodgings. The most eligible we have, in my idea, are at present unengaged, and will be vacant in two months; their present possessor, Mrs Ironmonger, removing, at that time, to an house in St John's Street. All people of genius like a retired situation, a rus in urbe, if they settle in a city. With that taste these lodgings will not be deemed un

pleasant, and Mr B. had better secure them immediately.

How I love that dear impatience of yours to pay every possible respect to those you loveliving or dead! but am glad you were called upon to put off your mourning-robe, which affection had prematurely assumed.

My own situation makes me interested in the prolonged existence even of strangers, whose faded powers render them but useless burdens in the consideration of a busy world-since, probably, they may be as dear to some of their near connections as my poor father is to me.

Without the ties of consanguinity, you love Mr Sherwood for what he has been, and rejoice in the fallacy of a report which, I know, cost you sighs and tears. But you have a heart cast in no common mould, to whose warmth time, with all its wear and tear of the feelings, cannot impart the selfish chill; that chill which freezes all solicitude about those who can no longer serve or

amuse us.

I am, my dear Mrs Mompessan, always yours,

LETTER LXXIX.

WILLIAM HAYLEY, ESQ.

August 17, 1789.

My dear friend,-When you urged the necessity of an assiduously attentive friend and secretary to yourself, and an occasional preceptor to your darling, when indisposition or literary employment of another species should make it inconvenient to you to attend to him, I mentioned Mr W. as a person I know to be every way qualified for those trusts. I fear it will not be easy to find another companion of your travels so eligible in either sex, especially in ours. France may, however, perhaps supply you with what I think England could not, an amiable and accomplished woman, who durst put her peace and fame into the hazard of living domestically, during some years, with the most dazzling and engaging of mankind. Nothing but a considerable independent fortune can enable an amiable female to look down, without misery, upon the censures of the many; and even in that situation, their arrows have power to wound, if not to destroy peace. Surely no woman,