Assure Mr Selwyn how much of all these I felt myself on Sunday se'ennight about two o'clock. You do not think of going to France, I trust, since there is little hope that her convulsive struggles will subside so soon. Adieu!

LETTER LXXXIV.

MR CARY.

Dec. 19, 1789.

HERE is the task you sent nie from the Italian. I have made it an Idyllium; for, as to sonnet, there is a gravity in the air of English sonnet-measure, ill-suited to such a playful bagatelle. After all, this is just that sort of poetry which, containing nothing intrinsically that deserves the name, is indebted for its power of pleasing to a certain nameless grace of manner, and turn of expression, which inevitably evaporate, in their transfusion from a peculiarly sweet, into an harsher, though perhaps a grander, language.

You had received this attempt sooner, but the ability to employ myself has been all this week annihilated, by a dreadful shock my spirits receiv

ed in the sudden death of poor faithful old Thomas Reid, who nursed, and watched, and protected my dear helpless, and "child-changed" father. The awful and heart-affecting scene passed before these eyes, that had never beheld a human being expire. It has left an impression which will, I believe, never be effaced. Perfectly well, till the instant of his seizure on Sunday morning, from which moment he lived only three hours! The next Wednesday evening no vestige left of him earth! I have not words to express upon how much it affected me to hear him say, while he knew he was dying,-" Let my master (who was going to breakfast) have three dishes of tea." The very last words he spoke were when my little dog sprung upon his knee, as he sat in the arm-chair, and ran up his breast, visibly alarmed, and soliciting, with her little foot, the attention of her dying bedfellow, "O! poor Sappho! I can do no more for thee !"

Then was it, and often after, through this week, so deeply shadowed over to me by the consciousness of death, that the pathetic exclamation of Werter rushed upon my mind: "Last night he stood upright; he had all his strength-this morning he lies cold, stiff, insensate.- -What is death ?—we do but dream when we talk of it! Such are the limits of our feeble nature, we have no clear con

ceptions of the beginning, or of the end of our existence. This hour I possess myself, and all my powers, corporal and intellectual-the next, perhaps, dead-yet a few more, and shut up in a pit!-so deep! so cold! so dark!-Death! grave! I understand not the words!"

It will scarcely at present be in my power to attempt the Italian sonnet which you think so sublime. Mr White has brought Lavater on Physiognomy; and, as it is borrowed for me, I must not detain it. The subject of this same sonnet, the cities of Catania and Syracuse swallowed up by an earthquake, is certainly of the last solemnity; but I do not think the author has treated it in the best-possible manner at the opening; the unpathetic play upon the word yourselves, is one of those Italian conceits which always displease me. On this terrific theme it does more than displease me. If I attempt the sonnet in English, I shall discard it entirely. Here it conveys at once a conceit and an untruth, since, though there might then remain no visible trace of those cities, testimonies of themselves did certainly remain in themselves, and, by digging deep enough, might as certainly be found as the traces of Herculaneum, or the city Pompeia, which, a Venetian gentleman said, as recorded by Mrs Piozzi, an English hen and chickens might scratch

up in a week, so lightly are they covered by pumice-stones and ashes. The conclusion of this sonnet is truly sublime. I should like to perceive language occurring to me capable of doing it justice; but of such propitious inspiration I have little hope. I deliver up my present leisure to Lavater, and remain sincerely yours.

LETTER LXXXV.

MRS PIOZZI.

Dec. 21.

AND So, my dear Madam, you wish me to write a tragedy. Alas! if I had powers, I have not leisure for an attempt, to which the polite, though probably mistaken, confidence you express in my abilities might else stimulate my exertions; yet, in despite of this encouraging confidence, the task would be attended with more anxiety than I have fortitude to encounter; and, if I had leisure to attempt, and courage to hope a conquest over all these restraining considerations, the recollection how coolly Jephson's noble tragedies have

been received, would freeze the Melpomenean ink in my standish.

Suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive, and entertaining publication*; yet shall it be with the sincerity of friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment. No work of the sort I ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of placing the reader in the scenes, and amongst the people it describes. Wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pagesbut the infinite inequality of the style !-permit me to acknowledge to you what I have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless wonder, that Mrs Piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of Johnson, should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her animated pages-that, while she frequently displays her power of commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should generally use those inelegant, those strange dids, and does, and thoughs, and toos, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the sentence;-which are, in language, what the rusty black silk handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of