particular skill in his profession. Mr Piozzi is an handsome man, in middle life, with gentle, pleasing, and unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his profession. Though he has not a powerful or fine toned voice, he sings with transcending grace and expression. Dr Darwin's Botanic Garden is contracted for with the booksellers, and we may expect its appearance next spring. Splendid and charming as is this poem, yet, written upon the, I think, mistaken system, that nothing which is not imagery should find a place in poetry, the incessant profusion of ornament will perhaps be a disadvantage to the work in general, as to the pleasure and attention it has, from the genius of its author, so just a right to expect every reader will feel and express. The Botanic Garden is a string of poetic brilliants, and they are of the first water; but the eye will be apt to want the intersticial black velvet to give effect to their lustre. Ah! my dear bard, I would to Friendship, that I might find your letters less the reverse in their infrequency to the pictures of the Botanic Garden, kindred as they are to them in the brightest tints of imagination. LETTER LXXV. F. N.C. MUNDY, ESQ *. Lichfield, Oct. 10, 1787. I CANNOT help once more intruding on your attention, with my thanks that you have granted a request which I had set my heart on obtaining. My gratitude will not brook delay, even though my heart yet trembles from yesterday's storm; another dangerous attack on the life of my dear aged father; but danger, for the present, is once again passed away. A perusal of the posthumous works of that sweet suffering saint, Miss Bowdler, has pleased me much. If they contain no great resplendence of genius, nor curious novelty of ideas, we yet feel our hearts and our understandings serenely warmed and gratified by the effusions of a pure, a gentle, a cultivated mind, which throws a soft, agreeable, and useful light over every subject on which it descants. This Gentleman, author of the Poem on Needwood Forest, is still alive, and resides at Mark-eaton, near Derby. So your learned pedant asserted, that nothing could be more absurd than the idea, in Gray's Welch Bard, that the victorious army of Edward were alarmed, and that one of its chiefs stood entranced, at the voice of an old man from a rock. He who could talk thus of Gray's Old Man, must have an imagination dull as that of an old woman, whose youth had been occupied in making pies and puddings, and nursing rickety children. He an admirer of Shakespeare! Whip me such critics, and such admirers, round Parnassus, O ye muses! Your other dogmatist, who declared that nothing was so easy as to write well in rhyme, like the fox contemplating the high-hung grapes, speaks lightly, but not sincerely, of a treasure which he finds himself unable to obtain. The use of rhymes must necessarily increase the difficulty of writing in measure; and when it is remembered that the great critic, Cicero, tried, in vain, to write good poetry, we find the asserted ease of the art presumptuous and ridiculous, because evidently false. Merely to jingle common-place ideas in rhyme, may be easy enough; but to make fine sense, animated and appropriate description, and beautiful imagery, recline gracefully on that Procrustean bed, is about as easy as to compose music like Handel or Hedyen, and to paint like Reynolds, Romney, and Fuzeli. 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, re specting 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 between 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, though they 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, 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 |