with a nice sense of honour,-and what is she worth who has it not?-would voluntarily expose herself to their aim, except she has unwarily slid into a situation where the affections, making silent and unperceived progress, have rendered it a less evil to endure the consciousness of a dubious fame, provided there is no real guilt, than to renounce the society of him, without whom creation seems a blank.

Why see we no account of a picture of Romney's in the Shakespearean Gallery?—Apropos of pictures, I have a very fine print of Sir Joshua's portrait of Mrs Siddons in the tragic muse; but the defects and incongruities of the situation and drapery amaze me a heavy theatrical chair of state on the clouds, gold-lace and pearls, plaited hair, and the imperial tiara upon an allegorical figure, which sorrow and high-souled resolve must be 'supposed to have incapacitated for the studied labours of the toilette.

I want to read a new book, which I hope to get in a few days, because report says it is yours; but the title, Cornelia Sedley, or the Young Widow, has no sound Hayleyan. They tell me it is moral and religious; so there can be no reason for your having printed it anonymously. Probably the real author withholds his name, and has caused it to be given out to be yours, that it may

get into instant reading. The work must surely, however, be worth attention, or such report could not have obtained a shadow of credence.

The contemptible rage for novel-reading, is a pernicious and deplorably prevalent taste, which vitiates and palls the appetite for literary food of a more nutritive and wholesome kind. It surprises me that superior genius stoops to feed this reigning folly, to administer sweet poison for the age's tooth; and yet when I find a work of that sort charming, I feel inclined to pardon the countenance the author gives to a destructive propensity.

Adieu!-In the trust that this letter will reach you before you embark for the continent, I commission it with my solicitous benedictions. Yours,

LETTER LXXX.

MISS WESTON.

Sept. 3, 1789.

I CONSIDER myself in debt to you, dear Sophia, for a very long, a more than very entertaining letter, which you sent me in July, and this

notwithstanding the short letters which have lately passed between us on the regretted renunciation of the purposed scheme.

After a five months elapse, since you heard from me in February, you make no single comment upon the contents of that my long epistle-not even acknowledge the receipt of it.

This habit, so invariably persisted in by Miss W., has been but lately adopted by you, who used to be in that method which can alone give letter-writing, however brilliantly executed, a right to the name of correspondence, viz. to have the letter we are answering before us, and commenting upon its passages, instead of passing them over in disregarding silence. I confess I think all the spirit of epistolary intercourse depends upon our adoption of that rule.

Somewhat too much of all this-let us pass on to matter of pleasanter interest.

Miss Nott is become a personage of considerable fortune, by the death of her brother-but it seems to produce no change in her way of life— no carriage, no additional servants. She is wise. -Parade would soon have swallowed up the added fruits of her income, and probably left her less real plenty than she had before. Our establishment must be a degree below our income, if we would sleep in peace. O! that certain friends of

ours did feel this truth, as their sense and virtues make one expect they should feel it! I know Miss Nott to be generous while she is prudent.

Miss Maylin seems, from your description, the very being you ought to wish her. Where there is so much youth and beauty, that slumber of the passions makes well for the peace of a monitory friend—while the advantages, beneath your roof, from the accomplishments and manners of her instructress, are eminently calculated to inspirit her serenity.

You are very good to wish me in your family, but I am fixed, by my apprehensions, here, like the needle to its magnet; holding constant, though trembling residence.

If Miss Williams complied with my request, you have read, in the letter she was to shew you, my opinions of Zeluco, and also of the unaccountable farrago of wit, and disgraceful vulgarity of expression-lively, interesting, striking remarks, and sickening affectation-historic knowledge, and language that would shame a schoolgirl, interspersed with some few sentences exempted from these deeply sullying stains, and truly eloquent.

Miss Williams makes a poetically sacrilegious comparison of these volumes to the plays of

Shakespeare, where gross and glaring defects are atoned at full, by the largely preponderating beauties; but the defects of Shakespeare sprung entirely from the false taste of his times; and at a period when the general style was loaded with vulgarism, was stiff and barbarous, his is generally nervous, brilliant, musical-his expressions beyond attainment happy; and, in fine, his style one of his chief beauties. In these volumes it is ungrammatic, confused, and barbarous, at a juncture in which language has acquired its utmost degree of refinement, its last polish. Miss W. pleads again, that the author has been led into this grossness by adopting a colloquial style. It was extremely possible to have done that without any sins against perspicuity, grammatic accuracy, and elegance. The fictitious letters of Lovelace and Belford, Miss Howe, and Lady G., and the real ones of Gray, breathe the language of conversation. Their gay undress is of the purest muslin, whose folds float about them in stainless purity, and graceful ease. The undress of these volumes is as a soiled, patched, and unfashionable garb upon a very handsome woman, and its being sprinkled over with valuable gems, but renders its squalidness the more disgusting.

Nothing can exceed, in degree, my wonder and disappointment to meet such a jargon, where I