lustre, from the pen of Mr Stevens of Repton, in Derbyshire an English version of the first part of Horace's Ode to Grosphus, and of the Greek poet Moschus's fourth Idyllium; and also an original sonnet, which has no poetic fault, however it may sin on the score of partiality to me. The stupidity of review-criticism, and the as stupid respect paid to it by the general reader, blighted the first rich fruits of this gentleman's imagination, and, by damping his poetic ardour, has robbed our age of the light of his genius, to which nature gave strength, and to which learning gave purity. O! there is nothing against which my spirit more revolts, than to see dulness deciding upon works of imagination, or envy endeavouring to darken them. I wish none were permitted to enter the lists of criticism but those who feel poetic beauty as keenly as yourself, and who have the same generous desire that others should feel it. Adieu.

LETTER XXXIV.

TO MISS Weston.

Lichfield, July 20, 1786.

YES, truly, dear Sophia, our public critics are curious deciders upon poetic claims. Smiled you not to see the reviewer of verse, in a late Gentleman's Magazine, gravely pronouncing, "that it is trifling praise for Mrs Smith's sonnets to pronounce them superior to Shakespeare's and Milton's? O! rare panegyrist! Such praise may vie, as an offering at the shrine of dulness, with the censure which the Monthly Review passed on Jephson's noble tragedy, the Count of Narbonne, and with that fulminated in the Critical one against the first fair blooms of Mr Stevens's poetic talents, his charming poem, Retirement. Thus it is that the extremes of unfeeling censure, and of hyperbolic encomium, meet in one sickening point of absurdity.

""Tis such the goddess hears with special grace,
While veils of fogs dilate her awful face."

You say Mrs Smith's sonnets are pretty ;—so say I; -pretty is the proper word; pretty tuneful centos from our various poets, without any thing original. All the lines that are not the lines of others are weak and unimpressive; and these hedge-flowers to be preferred, by a critical dictator, to the roses and amaranths of the two first poets the world has produced!!!-It makes one sick.

The allegory in this lady's Origin of Flattery, is to me wholly incomprehensible :-Why Venus should take the helmet of Mars, for a vessel in which to make the oil of flattery, I cannot understand. You will find all that is tolerable in this poem taken from Hesiod's rise of Woman, translated by Parnel.

Much, indeed very much, above every thing Mrs Smith has published, are the poems of Helen Williams. We trace in them true sensibility of heart, and the genuine fires of an exalted imagination. Who would not forgive to their sparkling effervescence the occasional want of metaphoric accuracy, with all the other juvenile errors of a judgment as yet unripened by time?

Ere I quit the critical theme, permit me to inveigh against the present senseless custom of excluding all capitals except at the beginning of sentences, and to actual proper names. Such exclusion is of serious bad consequence to poetry,

I mean to the general taste for it, by rendering it more difficult to be understood by the common reader. Capitals to every substantive are cumbrously intrusive upon the eye, but surely to whatever is impersonized, to whatever acts, a capital letter is as necessary as to a proper name. When abstracted qualities are clothed and embodied by fancy, common sense revolts at their sneaking appearance with a little letter. If we say, "We feel pleasure in contemplating the lovely scene,” it is proper to write pleasure with a small letter; but if we say, "Pleasure shed all her lustre over the scene," the word requires a large one as much as any other proper name. It was said to a public singer, who sung an energetic song of Handel's too tamely, "Zounds, Sir, you spell God with a little g."

You will find, in the Gentleman's Magazine for June last, a pretty poem of my father's. It contains little sketches of his own local vicissitudes, and of the characters of his brother Canons, then of this cathedral. I had forgotten it, not having seen its face these twenty years, nor knew I that a copy was extant.

We have no guess by

what means it crept into that publication, but I am glad it is preserved.

In a former letter I spoke to you of the gratification my musical enthusiasms met during a late expedition to town;-but think I forgot to mention that I had three or four interviews with the extraordinary and pleasing Mrs She is in as strong health, and as lively spirits, is as witty, as humorous, as eloquent, as friendly, as insinuating, as fascinating as ever; but more than ever snuffy, and dirty, and paltry in her dress; and, amidst her accumulated wealth, more than ever penurious in all her habits.

For the first time, I saw the justly celebrated Mrs Siddons in comedy,-in Rosalind :-but though her smile is as enchanting, as her frown is magnificent, as her tears are irresistible, yet the playful scintillations of colloquial wit, which most strongly mark that character, suit not the dignity of the Siddonian form and countenance. Then her dress was injudicious. The scrupulous prudery of decency, produced an ambiguous vestment, that seemed neither male nor female. When she first came on as the princess, nothing could be more charming; nor than when she resumed her original character, and exchanged comic spirit for dignified tenderness.

One of those rays of exquisite and original discrimination, which her genius so perpetually elicits, shone out on her first rushing upon the stage