nounced that no virtue can exist in the mind it envenoms.

That emulation may degenerate into envy, is certain, as an overflow of health may produce fatal distemper; but then it can only thus degenerate where the temper is morose. Passions, so different in their nature, and in their effects, can have no natural, much less inevitable tendency to incorporate.

While Chaucer's historian thus, in three sentences, resembles Johnson's style and manner, he writes of his author with a very different spirit from that which dipt in aquafortis the biographic pen which chronicled our poets. Mr Urry very beautifully descants on the genius and writings of the father of English verse; and with an efflorescence of diction, as little common to the prose of that period, as was the nervous compression as to style, in the preceding extract from the Life of Chaucer-thus:

"Chaucer's life was temperate and regular. He went to rest with the sun in summer, and, rising before it, enjoyed the pleasures of the best part of the day, his morning walk and fresh contemplations. Hence he had the advantage of describing the morning in that lively manner which we so often find exemplified in his works. The springing sun glows warm in his lines, and the

fragrant air breathes cool in his descriptions. We smell the sweets of the blooming haws, and hear the music of the feathered choir, whenever we take a forest-walk with him. The hour of the day is not easier to be discovered from the reflection of the sun in Titian's paintings, than in Chaucer's morning-landscapes.”

It is amiable in the biographer of excellent persons to place every merit in the fullest light; and generous minds are more disposed to pardon a little over-weening partiality, than the slightest treachery of unjust depreciation; while, to ungenerous minds, more welcome is that caustic-spleen which gratifies their wish of levelling the exalted. Of Mr Urry's far more virtuous partiality, 1 met a striking instance in the following passage.

"In most of Chaucer's poems, where he designs an imaginary scene, he certainly copies it from a real landscape. In his Cuckow and Nightingale, the morning-walk may be traced at this day, from his house, through part of the park, into the vale under Blenheim Castle, as certainly as we may be assured that maples, instead of phylereas, were the ornaments round the bower."

Always charmed by local appropriation in poetic landscape, I eagerly turned to the passage referred to in Chaucer's Cuckow and Nightingale, and found it thus:

“And right anon, as I the day espied,
No longer would I in my bed abide,
But into a wood that was me fast by,
I went forth alone myself boldily,

And held my way down by a brooke's side,

Till I came to a land of white and green,
So fair an one had I never in been ;
The ground was green powder'd with daisy,
The flowris and the groves alikie,

All green and white was nothing ellis seen.

There sat I down among the fair flowris,
And saw the birds tripping out of their bowris;
There as they roosted them had all night,
They were so joyful of the dayis light,
They began of May for to do honoris."

Thus closes a description which has, in truth, none of that local appropriation attributed to it. by Mr Urry. It is alike suited to every scene through which runs a brook. The daisies do nothing for the appropriation, since every English turf at least has its daisies. The land, therefore, of white and green can present no peculiar spot. We know not, from such expressions, whether the place described be a hill, a valley, a field, a forest, or a glen. This indistinctness, this total want of local discrimination, renders poetic landscape very defective. Since the time of Chaucer, its duties have been better understood. Milton's and Thom

son's landscapes are so distinct, that the painter might draw from them as readily as from Nature herself; while, before the poetic imagination, they rise discriminate and complete in all the tints of their season. Nor less accurate is the scenicpainting of our best modern poets. The scene they delineate lives in their verse. I confess, however, there is one very picturesque line in my quotation from the old bard:

"And saw the birds tripping out of their bowris."

It is an image that strongly, as well as beautifully, marks the hour of summer's dawn.

Ah! what an hour of pleasantness and prime is that in this sultry period!-but, weary and oppressed with the heats of the preceding day, the leaden mace of sleep lies too heavy on our lids to permit us to look on the half-opened eyes of the morning, or to view the sun

"While yet his dewy radii slope to earth,
And all the kindling landscapes of the east
Rise gemm'd to meet his beams."

LETTER XVIII.

MISS PONSONBY.

Lichfield, June 19, 1798.

I HOPED to have acknowledged my loved Miss Ponsonby's last, and very kind letter, in an hour when the reply might have commenced with those glad gratulations that my heart longs to utterbut the felicity is at present denied me. The rest of many of my nights has been disturbed by the dread those sanguinary tidings inspired, which arrived from Ireland since I wrote to Lady Eleanor, and many a heartache has sickened the awaking hour.

To attain lettered ease and tranquillity of spirit, you fled together, in early youth, from the otherwise inextricable mazes of connection. The resolution and constancy with which the plan has been pursued through nineteen years, rendered it, as I thought, invulnerable to any long-enduring care, sorrow, or solicitude, while life and health were mutually lent you. Often have I said to myself, picturing the little Eden,