hospitable pleasure. Such is the power of ideal association.

Colonel Barry sends you his compliments, and talks with enthusiasm of your talents and graces.

LETTER LXIX.

WILLIAM HAYLEY, ESQ.

Lichfield, August 17, 1787.

THANK you, my dear bard, for your last letter. It has the kindness and the length of those former epistles, which were so much my pride and delight; yet as I seem fated to tell you whatever arises in my mind, immediately resulting from what has fallen from your pen, I must observe, jocularly tho', that however gratified with the general kindness of your last, I am not flattered by your placing your friendship for me on a level with your esteem and respect for a certain august personage. Conscious that you see characters as they are, undazzled by rank, even by the highest rank, I am ready to exclaim, with Ophelia,

No more but só!"

I have certainly mentioned to you, that the rage of alteration had laid our ancient and beautiful cathedral in temporary ruins, and shut her gates against her minstrels at least during two, and perhaps several more, years. The celebrated Wyatt is here, planning changes, which do not appear necessary, and which will be dreadfully expensive. Whatever of splendour and of beauty the unquestionable taste of the architect may achieve, the idea of them nothing recompenses to the lovers of sacred music, the silencing, during a period of such melancholy duration,

"The pealing organ, and the full-voic'd choir."

Mr Wyatt's manners please me. I reminded him of the beautiful compliment which you have paid to his genius somewhere in your works. Assured that I could find the passage, I promised to look for it. It eludes my search. Pray inform me where it is; for he, to whom it was justly paid, has never seen that gratifying tribute to his genius and art.

I have been much gratified by the reports made to me, by Mr Erasmus Darwin, of the etismation in which Lord Harrowby and Dr Darwin hold my Ode on General Elliot's return from Gibral

early excellence since I first knew Major André, in his eighteenth year, which I guess to be about the age of this literary wanderer. He was on his road into the Peak of Derbyshire, which he purposed to explore with philosophic examination. I tremble for his health, appearing, as he does, to have out-grown his strength; for he is very tall, and thin almost to transparency,

"While smooth as Hebe's his unrazor'd lip.”

You have heard of the success of that worthless time-serving supple flatterer, Mr. These are the people who obtain patrons and preferment;

"And they take place when virtue's steely bones,
Look bleak in the cold wind.”

LETTER LXVIII.

MISS WESTON.

Lichfield, July 19, 1787.

AFTER the delight of passing a month with

you, dear Sophia, amid your classic and lovely

environs, you will be glad that I found my beloved, my aged nursling, as well as when we separated. I must ever feel a trembling gratitude to Heaven, that none of those dire attacks, to which his feeble frame has long been subject, assailed him when I was so distant. You saw how my anxiety to receive intelligence of his safety, from day to day, hurried my spirits, shook my nerves, and interrupted the dear satisfaction of finding myself in such society. Upon so long an absence I never more will venture till the hour of everlasting absence. For an existence so feeble and deprived, it is perhaps a weakness to dread that hour so very passionately; yet, O! we may have more friends than one, but we have only one father.

I have had a kind letter from our excellent Mr Whalley. It is dated Bewdley, and I think decrees the palm of victory to Sir Edward Winnington's scenes near that place, from my darling Downton. Were I to see them, they would not, I believe, obtain my suffrage for such a pre-eminence. The smiling, the varied, the grand arrangement of objects, may be found in almost every country which is in any degree mountainous, and where wealth has been lavished to procure picturesque disposition;-but the Juan-Fer

tar. The Doctor has always spoken to me of that nobleman, as a man of much poetic taste. Mr E. Darwin said, that, in a strict critical scrutiny of this little poem, they praised often and warmly, and made but one objection; and that only to a single word; at last, remitting the verbal sin to the restraints and necessities of rhyme, which often compel far better poets than myself to use an expression which, writing in prose, they would perhaps reject as not the best possible. The word alluded to is here in italics,

"The billows, closing o'er their trembling frames,
Are purpled by the gore, illumined by the flames."

The last line, being a striking and appropriate picture of the peculiar feature of that naval victory, in which our ungenerous foes used red-hot balls, was worth retaining by a slight sacrifice in the preceding rhyme, of a word which might have expressed bodies better than the word frames, as forms, perhaps, or limbs. I considered the couplet before I sent the poem to press.

My poetic carpenter comes to see me soon. I had the pleasure of assisting to enable him to raise a sum sufficient to acquire his admission into partnership with an opulent cotton-spinner. He tells me he never made more than 501. per