nation has almost risen in mass!

Insurrection is likely, for the present, to be crushed in Ireland, and we exult and triumph, and shut our eyes to the long train of national evils inseparable from the continuance of a war we have no power to terminate on terms of tolerable advantage;-a war whose motives vanished, or changed their ground beneath our obstinate persistence ;—and how that persistence is, as you assert, to save Europe, if it should not destroy us, I am utterly at a loss to guess, disengaged as we are from all our allies, and not surely mad enough to begin again the desperate game of subsidy, without which, our ministers asserted that it was out of the power of the allies, four years ago, to oppose France to purpose. How, then, should they now oppose her, strengthened as she is, and they " exhausted, oppressed, and fallen." Armed and fortified against all outward assault, she can only fall by internal dissension, and that will never take place while foreign powers continue to menace her.

Without any senatorial connection, without a single selfish view to bias my understanding, these are my deep-felt convictions-they have resulted from a strictly dispassionate attention to the arguments for and against the prosecution of this war, from the period of its commencement, collected from a ministerial paper, the Evening

Mail-the only one I read, for I do not wish to see the errors of ministry on the exaggerating page of their avowed and indiscriminate foes. Heaven knows they are sufficiently gigantic on the tablets of their friends. I have read, with equal eye, the books of Burke, and of Boothby, and Macintosh, of Erskine, and of Gifford. Attached to the constitution of this country, and dreading revolution, I am alike disposed to censure the opposition as the ministry, when any thing falls from their lips or pens, which tends to produce tumult and revolt. Hence I have been reproached with aristocracy by the violent of the opposing party, and with democracy by the court idolaters ;-but you, however we may differ, will understand me better, believing me at once attached to the triune dominion of England, and one of the sincerest of your friends.

LETTER XX.

REV. H. F. CARY.

Lichfield, July 5, 1798.

You inquire, my friend, if the satiric powers in the Loves of the Triangles have not lowered my admiration of Dr Darwin's poetry-and add, that it is impossible that any thing which is so happily caricatured, can be in the best taste? To your question I answer, no ;-because I never considered that poetry as faultless, or its style as the best model for rising genius to adopt. I was always aware of the absurdities and affectations produced by its author's meretricious taste for ornament, and by his false system concerning poetic essentiality, viz. that nothing is poetry which is not picture; also by his intemperate use of those bold habits of style, which, moderately used, harmonize and inspirit; but, since these defects in his taste could not render me insensible to the immense powers of his genius, so neither can the broad light into which the former are thrown by this sportive mockery of rival talents, at all dim

my perception of the brightness, the splendour of the latter.

I cannot admit your Shaftsburean* principle respecting caricature; its impossibility of being happy if its object is excellent. I have frequently met with comic and witty parody of writing, which was in itself justly admirable. Several of the simply beautiful and touching parts in Shenstone's charming pastorals have been laughably burlesqued; and Sheridan, in his Critic, has thus wantoned with lovely passages in Shakespeare and Milton, particularly with Eve's enumeration and recapitulation of those objects which had delighted her in the presence of Adam, and in his absence lost the power to please. Now one single instance of disproof overthrows the despotism of an axiom.

Ridicule is certainly most powerful when it fastens upon bombast, affectation, and absurdity; but, by the power of wit, it can be very amusing without its object being in itself turgid, absurd, or affected. To be essentially ridiculous, and to be open to Ridicule, are, to my comprehension, different things. Inflation and foppery of style, are the broad marks at which she aims; but, I con

* Lord Shaftsbury maintains, that ridicule is the test of truth.-S.

ceive, that all novel, daring, and grand ideas, all that we term sublime, are vulnerable to her shafts; --that pathos and simplicity themselves have not shields of proof, which can only be worn by the bard, in compositions where the reasoning powers, rather than those of the heart or the imagination, prevail.

Many of the passages in Darwin's poetry, and in the notes, are exquisitely parodied in the Loves of the Triangles; such as use, with licentious frequency, alliteration, and those hyperboles which make mountains dance, put groves into ecstasies, and render caves sulky-those successive similies, commencing with so and thus, which, however beautiful in themselves, have to their subject no similitude, and are therefore absurd in their forced application;-the long continuation of passages that begin, "Gnomes," you did this," Nymphs," you did that; those which tend to applaud the fiend of Europe, modern liberty; and that hypothetical extravagance in the notes, which labours, by the most ridiculous suggestions, to get rid of Deity. These appear to possess in themselves, some an obvious, and some a latent portion of the ridiculous, which this satire exposes and draws out into glaring view; and that they, therefore, are in the first class of my distinction between inherent absurdity, and that which only momen