had promised myself a feast of Attic flavour. You know how much I had been charmed with the author's conversation. Interested in her fame, I lose all patience when I reflect how fully she possesses the powers to have rendered this work one of the most charming in our language. Her matter, in the style of the letter to which I am now replying, would have spread her fame over all the world. Few things would be more pleasing to me than to sit in the grotto of Pope, and to wander amid the walks and bowers which he planted. You felt those thrills of local delight, though you confess that the sad realities of life have taken off the edge of your poetical enthusiasm. Had it ever been keen, my Sophia, those said realities would have possessed no such power. When the spirit grows sick of their fallacy, it naturally returns, with double zest, to the unalloyed pleasures held out to our sympathy by exalted imaginations. The world grows dusky and faded in our eyesthe morning rays of hope illumine it no longer. Then do we say to ourselves, "So much the rather, thou celestial light, Miss Mathias is very good to love me so partially; and it is like a warm friend in you to love her the better on that account; but she has superior claims to your esteem in her own various merits. I am glad you converse often with Colonel Barry. Such Colonels are somewhat scarce. When I mentioned Pope, knowing that he pleases you above all other poets, I ought to have observed, that if you will take the trouble of procuring the Gentleman's Magazine of April, May, and June last, you will in them find me asserting the claims of Pope against those who deny to them splendour of imagination, beauty of style, and general superiority to Dryden in the path where each are most frequently found, the ten-feet couplet; for in lyric poetry he was inferior to Dryden. Your ingenious namesake has conceived a violent prejudice against Pope, and has published an essay to prove that, what he calls Pope's false brilliance, profuse ornaments, and laboured polish, have produced that universal degeneracy which, he says, now prevails in the art. Conscious that this strange opinion has been creeping into fashion long before it was so very openly asserted, I entered into the controversy, and maintained that it is false two ways-equally injurious to the high poetic claims of the present age, and to his who first taught that perfection in poems written in rhyme, which refines all the dross from the golden language of genius. I passed some hours last Tuesday in conversing with Lady Gresley of Bath, whom I have not seen during a period of near twenty years. I find her now what I thought her then, very sweet and interesting. She spoke of you, and of the dear -s with great regard, but shook her head over the superb furniture of their house, and of routs that assembled three hundred people. I said I fancied not much of the furniture was new. She said, all seemed new, and magnificent in a degree very inconsistent with less than a very opulent forAlas! what infatuation! what are they doing but dazzling and exciting the envy of fools, and the censure of the wise. tune. Adieu! my dear Sophia. LETTER LXXXI. MRS HAYLEY. Sept. 25, 1789. I WISHED to have answered dear Mrs Hayley's letter sooner, but my correspondence has been sluiced off into such a variety of channels, as to load me with the imputation of a thousand seeming neglects, which my heart regrets in vain. The death of Mrs French gave me more concern than we usually feel for the departure of those whom we do not personally know. Her character had interested me, and I looked forward with pleasure to the expectation of becoming acquainted with her. I was sorry also on your account. The loss of such a friend must make a chasm in your comforts and pleasures, which the limited intercourses of a provincial town do not readily or soon supply, but the vitality of friendship drops off, branch after branch, as we stay upon the earth. One day last week, I was honoured by a visit from two young ambassadors of the court of Portugal one to Denmark, the other to the Hague. They brought letters of introduction. It surprised me to find them so well masters of our language, and so familiar with the characteristic graces of our deceased poets-but the envy of contemporaries -the desire, stupid as unjust, which all ages have shewn, to persuade themselves that genius is, during their day, in a state of degeneracy, prevents the growth and expansion of an author's reputation, till his eyes are eternally closed upon its lustre. I could not, however, help feeling indignant surprise, that Mr Hayley's works had not, by our soul-less countrymen, been mentioned to these ingenious foreigners, whose evident taste for the English classics, and acquaintance with their beauties, disgraces the comparative ignorance of our own men of fashion, and the unpatriotic pedantry of our scholars. The latter are generally owls and bats to genius, which is not presented to them through the medium of a dead language, or at least a foreign. This stupid silence to these gentlemen, upon what ought to be our boast, is the more strange, because of that warm, generous, and beautiful eulogium, in Mr Hayley's poem on Epic Composition, which twines the wreath of preeminence over all the Spanish bards, around the brows of the epic poet Camoens, of whom Portugal is so justly proud. I read the passage to the ambassadors, and the tears of delight rushed |