foaming river, and the grand disorder of those mighty mountains which close the prospect.

Glover must not know that these his admirable landscapes have encountered the fastidiousness of a too precise, too vivid recollection; or, I should rather say, one of them; for the other is Dinbrenic, though rain-fraught clouds conceal the Eglwseg rocks almost entirely, and though the bright meads and dusky copses of the lovely, though narrow valley, between your house and the mountain of Castle-Dinas Bran, seem melted into each other, as beneath shrouding rains. A very picturesque effect is produced by one of the clouds, which seems in the act of rolling over the bosom of that mountainous cone; but the sky is turbid and terrible in its tempestuous aspect.

The less identified view has the softest lights of a summer evening horizon, when the sun leaves his last smile upon the hills.

A fine farce is playing in the senate; a juggle, of which the blindest idolaters of the weak, credulous, and cruel administration, now acting by their journeymen, seem ashamed. A finesse of meaner and more treacherous cunning no time has witnessed.

If the king had really opposed Mr Pitt's wishes respecting catholic emancipation, he would have made a real, not a mock resignation; and by an

appearance, at least, of honest resentment, have acquitted himself of premeditated treachery; but answering, as he does, for the persistence of his successor in the system which has ruined this nation, he puts but a cobweb-veil on his perfidy to Ireland, which every person penetrates; even his partizans here are offering wagers that he comes in again before the close of the year.

In becoming a tool to this despicable business; in consenting to stand forward the incompetent screen of Mr Pitt's low and perfidious manœuvres, Mr Addington acts beneath his own reputation, and deprives the nation of all rational trust in his integrity.

It is of the last importance to this country, that there should be a real change of ministry; that those should be called into power and action, who have uniformly demonstrated the impolicy and dangers of that system, which blasted our internal interests; confiscated our property in enormous and unprecedented taxation; and armed every nation against us. To its truly wise opposers we can only look with one hope, that is not insane, for rescue from our present perils, and preservation of the wreck, which yet remains, of British prosperity; a wreck which Mr Pitt, and his subservient senate, have made.

If ever a superintending Providence wrote disapprobation of human conduct in the broad characters of events, it has inscribed presumption, folly, and cruelty on this war, as it inscribed injustice and tyranny on that with America. From the self-incurred mischiefs and dangers of the American war, we were rescued by those who had uniformly opposed it. From the far greater mischiefs and dangers of this, we can only be so rescued now.

I doubt whether Lord St Vincent will accept the post which the newspapers have assigned him. I heard his entire disapprobation avowed, last summer, in one of his letters concerning the persisting in this contest, in which he has been so gallantly signalized. It is not likely that he will act with puppets danced on the Pittite wires.

All your eyes will be opened at last; but, I fear, not before the nation is irredeemably ruined. Desperation has begun its work in our little city, from my infant years, till within these six weeks, so peaceful and secure. Houses are broke open,

and nightly attempted. The deanery has been robbed; and five ruffians entered the chamber of. a widow lady, a mile out of town. Her property was saved by the presence of mind of her maidservant, who, with a watchman's rattle, alarmed

the neighbouring houses. My apprehensions have caused my dressing-room door to be barricadoed like a jail, with bars and bolts. Thus do we begin to lose, in more than imaginary terrors, the quiet of our curtained sleep. Adieu !

LETTER LXII.

EDWARD JERNINGHAM, Esq.

Lichfield, Feb. 23, 1801.

INDEBTED to you for two most gratifying letters, the delay of this acknowledgment can only plead excuse from the bad state of my health. It impedes the business of my pen; it is at war with the hope of longevity; but away with fruitless complaints and dismal forebodings!

Thank you for mentioning the new poetic literature. I have never seen any of Sir J. B. Burgess's verse. You tell me his epic poem has just emerged, and you say " It is the ton to commend it, though nobody reads it, because it is written in the Spenceric stanza." There is no true taste in such idle fastidiousness. It has, in the present instance, been caught from the prejudiced

pages of Johnson's Lives. I recollect that, in them, the Goliah lays a broad heavy paw upon that form of verse. Infinite mischief is done to science of every sort, by the often irrational dogmas of people of high ability.

One of the most justly admired of our modern poems, the Minstrel, is written in the Spenceric stanza, which, without narrative, can interest, and, without exciting the passions, can charm. No inevitable weariness, surely, attaches to an order of verse, through which such triumph has been attained. The Minstrel is certainly not of epic length; yet it is seldom that we read, at one sitting, more lines of an epic poem than are contained in the two books of the Minstrel. That, with all its genius and exhaustless fancy, the Fairy Queen tires our attention is certain; but it is of the eternal allegories, not of the measure, that we are weary.

Oberon is written in that measure, and, though a translation, a sort of epic, and certainly of epic length, has had very general reading, and may boast an everybody against Sir J. B. Burgess's nobody-but perhaps you will slily say, the voluptuous descriptions made the everybody for Oberon.

I have been amused by the gnat-strainers and camel-swallowers (who read a little poetry now