tarily seems absurd by the power of witty carica

ture.

The plan of Darwin's poem seems to me, in the second class, open to ridicule; not in itself more ridiculous than other allegories. Poetic felicity is surely in that plan, which enabled genius to invest the elementary properties with the finest imaginary forms; which empowered the poet to embody the vegetable creation; to endue its productions with passions and sentiments; to present the most striking, contrasted, and masterly landscapes to the eye of the reader, by describing the different places and scenes to which the plant or flower of his description is indigenous; to apply to poetry natural history, astronomic science, and the mechanic powers; to enlist in the service of illustration, which need not forcibly to have been applied, the stores of the author's recollection from history, fable, and anecdote. This plan was new, was comprehensive; it included the beautiful and sublime, and opened a wide field for the range of an imagination, daring, inventive, and picturesque as Darwin's: but it was open to ridicule, as our arch and able satirist has proved. It has however, on the whole, produced so much genuinely beautiful poetry, as to leave an immense preponderance of excellence in counterpoise of error :-excellence, the resistless enchantment of

which, neither this, nor any other rival necromancer has power to dissolve-at least to those whose poetic perceptions are too healthy to be palled by occasional disgust, given by the faults— into apathy to the perfections of an author :-betrayed by false taste into the first, and by genius abundantly presented with the latter. If thus, eminently master of the harmonic and picturesque graces, Darwin, who did not cultivate his poetic talent, except in short and light compositions, till he had passed his half century, had shunned the frequent fault of young poets, that of defacing his verse by ardour to adorn it: if he had felt the divine power of the simply grand, and simply beautiful, how few writers, ancient or modern, had held the light of excellence above him!

If Dr D. had been a fair and generous decider on the literary claims of others; had he been as desirous of bestowing as of receiving just praise, I should painfully sympathize with the mortification he is likely to feel, from his consciousness of the numbers whom this brilliant satire will induce to think they have admired in the wrong place, and celebrated what they ought to have despised; -who will be as ready to adopt indiscriminate and unjust contempt, as they were to feel unqualified and blind admiration. For this loss of pregent universal homage, I question if Dr D.'s

mind is strong enough to feel recompence in his inevitable conviction, that his poetic and his philosophic writings possess the germs of a vitality which will be coëval with the existence of the English language.

Perhaps few have sufficient fortitude to sustain, unwounded, such reverse as this satire will produce in the present opinion of the reading multitude, always composed of those who have no power of judging for themselves. Self-love might not be able to find sufficient consolation from reflecting, that the continued suffrages of the ingenious, the discerning, and generous few, must, by slow degrees, place their compositions on that high and firm ground on which, though not perhaps impeccable, they have a right to stand. Adieu.

LETTER XXI.

MISS PONSONBY.

Buxton, Aug. 9, 1798.

I CONGRATULATE my dear friends upon the sweet and, I trust, lasting repose of their fears for the state of Ireland. Alas! that it should have cost such a bleeding price: yet that the greatly worse is averted, must inspire a sense of delight from subsided terror, which the intermingled bitterness of victim-regret cannot do away.

The increasing power of my rheumatic malady, forced me to seek these springs rather than the billows of High Lake, from which I should have been thrice happy in circling home by Langollen. Thus the halcyon days, which last summer were mine, may not gild and inspirit this. If I live, and the fiend of the joints remits his persecution, I hope, next year, to see and converse with friends, to whose society my whole mind is wedded; and to see the image of that fair creature, who shed the light of happiness over many of my youthful years, honoured with so enshrined a situation.

This month is always high season at Buxton. The crowd is immense, though I never remember so few families of rank, and there is a tristful lack of elegant beaux. The male youth and middle life of England are, you know, all soldierized and gone to camps and coasts; and so a few prim parsons, and a few dancing doctors, are the forlorn hope of the belles.

And here is Mrs Powys of Berwick, in loveliness which none of them can approach, which time seems to have lost his power to tarnish, which no custom of the eye can pall.

No, dear Madam, I was not, as you suppose, favoured with a letter from General Washington, expressly addressed to myself; but, a few years after peace was signed between this country and America, an officer introduced himself, commissioned from General Washington to call upon me, and to assure me, from the General himself, that no circumstance of his life had been so mortifying as to be censured in the Monody on André, as the pitiless author of his ignominious fate: that he had laboured to save him—that he requested my attention to papers on the subject, which he had sent by this officer for my perusal.

On examining them, I found they entirely acquitted the General. They filled me with contrition for the rash injustice of my censure. With