Caliph Vathec? that strange, wild, witty, Voltairish, yet very original work; so ludicrous in its opening, and on its progress ;-so very sublime in its conclusion: The Halls of Eblis form an hell, solemn and striking as the fiery Deserts of Danté, or the Erebus of Milton.

Your friends, the Ardens, are a charming family. I love them all. The rich bride of your namesake seems to have a disposition worthy of him on which she has bestowed her fortune, and calculated to make him find his best treasure in herself. I received a kindly pressing invitation from them lately to their house in Shrewsbury, and to attend a concert for the benefit of a fair syren, in whose fate I am much interested. I could not, however, accept this obliging invitation. To preserve from total extinction that dim quivering light, my poor father's existence, demands my daily unremitted cares: All its intellectual rays have gone out, one by one-even the, to me, so precious consciousness of my tender assiduities is extinguished, but it remained the last of his vanishing sensibilities. Adieu! Yours.

LETTER XCII.

MRS PIOZZI.

Feb. 20, 1790.

No, dear Mrs Piozzi, you cannot possibly know so little the extent and force of your abilities, to think they could not awaken, charm, and arrest the attention, without its being first started into wonder by apparent and unexpected defect. If Shakespeare had never punned and quibbled, should we have been the less penetrated, inflamed, and delighted with his excellencies? I repeat, that you shew us, in the very work which I so long to have you weed, that you have a style at your command, perfect and polished as that of your great preceptor. Who, amongst those whom genius can think it worth its while to please, can read him without the most awakened attention; yet when does he condescend to use the dialect of the unlettered vulgar!-but I beg your pardon, dear Madam, for pressing farther an unwelcome theme, which, if I did not make sincerity my first point of honour in friendship, had never intruded upon your attention. It may perhaps occur to you,

that I might have been silent upon the subject. I consulted my own heart, and it told me that if I had published a considerable work, I should think acknowledged objections, mingled with liberal praise, more friendly than cold disregarding silence. It is the ambition of my heart to act, as much as possible, on every occasion, up to that golden rule" Do unto others as thou wouldst," &c.

You have illustrated, in your last obliging letter, by a charmingly ingenious and just simile, the difference between Richardson's novels and Miss Burney's; but as fine painters may expect their portraits to be valuable when the persons of their originals are no more remembered, they ought to avoid adopting the dress of the times ;so, surely, fine writers should describe general nature, rather than fashionable manners.

You certainly placed Mr Merry's poetry above all other poetry the world has produced, when you asserted, that to read any other after his, was to contemplate the sculpture of Sansovino after having seen the statues, whose superiority to all other sculpture the whole world allows. Surely there can be no explaining away a meaning so single and obvious; but in speaking upon this subject in your last, you surprise me anew.

You say Mr M. having only written odes and love verses, is neither an epic, a dramatic, nor a preceptive poet, and must therefore aspire only to a fame of a far lower kind, such as an odist may pretend to. I have always understood that lyric poetry was the very highest order of composition next to the epic. Pindar, whom the learned world always places next in rank to Homer and Virgil, wrote only odes—and the English Pindar, Gray, is the most illustrious name of our era. Certainly, therefore, if Della Crusca's odes had been first-rate compositions in their line, he might have claimed the first honours of poetry, after the epic writers, our immortal Shakespeare alone excepted, and he is the only dramatic writer of any time, whose fame transcends that of Pindar, Horace, Dryden, and Gray. Of the claims of an ode-writer, Horace had very different ideas to those you express; witness the conclusion of his first ode to Mecenas:

"Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseres,
Sublimi feriam sidera vertice."

Petrarch's poetry is all or chiefly sonnets, is it not?-a short but a very arduous style of composition. His sonnets are said to be exquisite,

and have, therefore, raised his name high amidst our bards. To be able to write sonnets finely, is more honourable than to be the author of plays that are of second-rate merit. Petrarch is famed for his sonnets,—I never heard of him as a lyric poet,-yet, on their account merely, he is a name of more eminence than that of our Southern, or even Rowe. It matters little what order of composition is chosen by an highly sublimated imagination. Such a one, however, can hardly make a choice more worthy of its powers than the lyric style. Ode-writing surely attained not to excellence under the management of Cowley. We see genius in his forced and far-fetched ideas; but it is genius ill-directed, and rather calculated to disgust than to charm a correct natural taste,

"When he on all things will intrude;
To force some odd similitude.”

There is only one of his odes that pleases me on the whole, though that is not without its faults, but it is tender, pathetic, glowing, and beautiful. I mean the ode entitled The Complaint. It is curious that Johnson, in his interesting and ingenious life of that poet, mentions it with contempt; so little did Johnson appear to understand, or feel the genuine beauty of lyric verse.