When Mrs Knowles, who knows the difficulties and the merits of the pencil, saw Romney's Circe, she exclaimed, "What a number of bad, indifferent, moderate, good, and very good pictures must the hand paint ere it attains the sublimity of that figure !"

So may it be said of Allegro Penseroso, the Triumphs of Temper, and the Needwood Forest. If I am any judge of poetry, the last-named work is, as a descriptive poem, little inferior to the two first. Publish it at large, I adjure you, yet again; and reflect upon this truth for your comfort, respecting the publication of your juvenile compositions, that they have not, by many degrees, the inferiority to your Needwood, that the poems in the 2d volume of Milton, which were written ber tween his eighteenth and twenty-third years, have to his Allegro and Il Penseroso. Poems that are pretty, though not perhaps first-rate, move, in the eyes of posterity, like satellites round the orb of a great work, and adorn its appearance, thoughthey may not increase its lustre. Remember!and do not continue to wrap your talents in a napkin, unfolding them only to individual inspection.

LETTER LXXVI.

GEORGE HARDINGE, ESQ.

Lichfield, Oct. 25, 1787.

As to your verbal aversions, friend of mine, and witty son of Themis, nothing in nature, science, or fashion itself, was ever so unaccountable. Your protest against the words mossy, breezy, turfy, steepy, windy, &c. must, in common justice, extend to all their brethren of the y termination to gloomy, glassy, airy, flowery, wintry, angry, &c.

"No more the grotts shall I behold you climb,
Or steepy hills, to crop the flowery thyme.”—Dryden.

Whence can the dislike spring? Have we too many vowels in our language, that you seek to render it harsher, by depriving us of a privilege by which we are at once enabled to condense our sense, to give picture with fewer strokes of the pen, and to soften our terminations?

It was necessary to the appropriation of Mr Mundy's description, that he should shew the

turfiness of the forest-glades, since glades are not all turfy; and why should he circumambulate the vocabulary for another couplet, to talk in harsher diction about glades of turf, lest there should be a mortal, whose ear was so whimsically constructed, that it could not endure the epithet turfy? How was he to divine a possibility so improbable? You are, in truth, a very presbyterian as to language," blaspheming custard and plumbporridge."

Alterations in pretty verses, made in the paroxysms of the toothach, were not likely to be worth much, and you are welcome to shoot them out of existence with the arrows of your wit. I always considered yearning as a stronger expression, but synonymous to longing. I know it is a scriptural phrase; but I did not know, till you informed me, that it had an inseparable connecticn with the abdominal fiddle-strings.

Spence's rules for the fabrication of poetry are good; but when he applies them to criticising particular passages, he blunders horribly. Some two months since, Sir James Lake recommended to my attention Spence's Dissertation on the Odyssey. Till then, I knew not of its existence This request has led me into the composition of a critical tract, which covers seventeen sheets of

paper, and enters the lists against more than one Zoilus.

Adio!

LETTER LXXVII.

MRS KNOWLES.

Lichfield, Oct. 29, 1787.

THE intelligencer of former times, Captain Wolesley, has been here, after having, during very many years, ceased to exhibit himself in this place, with his meaning smile, and nod of confirmation, which gives rumour so much the air of truth. He told me of marriage-vestments preparing for you; announced Bath the scene where the warp and woof of your bridal-sheets were casting; that a man of large fortune had set the Lady Destinies at work, who was en train to renounce the great * Diana of Ephesus for the Mary of the Meeting-House.

* Mrs Knowles, who is a Quaker, used to give that term to our Established Church,

S.

The moment she heard of your widowhood, shrewd Mrs Cobb pronounced you a bank-bill, whom any man would accept at sight. Ah me! my heart smites me that I should write thus sportively of a situation, in which you are placed by an event which has cost me many sighs, and which I shall always regret.

Your letter from Buxton, so all yourself in wit and spirit, made me hope and look from day to day, to see you here in your road to town. Its pictures of Buxton have science in them to delight a philosophic amateur, and grotesque original humour to divert the merest John Bull, if there should be an atom of risibility in his composition.

I told you of the groundless ideà taken up in this place about your being left in narrow circumstances, solely to obtain your own authority for contradicting it, and without a shadow of apprehension that it had any basis. I, who had been a witness, during some weeks, at different times, to Dr Knowles's immense practice; who also knew that nothing resembling luxury or unnecessary expence prevailed in your family; I, to whom he had mentioned having realised ten thousand pounds in the year 1783, could not but be assured, you had a much larger income left you than you ever would expend.