ready to compose their feuds by arbritation, on the impartial justice of which experience had taught them to rely. The following sentence is in her will: " As a memorial of our long friendship, I leave to Miss Seward twenty of my books, and desire she may have the first choice." I wear, as it is meet I should, those mourning garments for her, which, though no ties of blood subsisted, she wore for my angelic sister-my mother-my father. Her memory is consecrated in my heart, which does not suffer those it loved to lie forgotten in the grave.

I will not apologize to you for having sketched her portrait upon so wide a canvas. She was no every-day character.

To the interesting pages of your letter my attention shall now be turned. I had mourned your sullen abjuration of the muses, when the daystar of your hopes had shot madly from her radiant sphere, into the irremeable gulf of disgrace and misery. I thought that needless resolve an unwise rejection of the sweetest and most healing balm which imagination can pour upon the wounds of the heart. Thus I could not but rejoice in the resurrection of your poetic taste and powers. I congratulate you that their first fruits are so soon to meet the public eye. I hope Mre

Siddons, for whose filial loss I am truly concerned, will be enabled to give your tragedy the high advantage of her matchless energies and graces. I long to know its title and subject. Lord Carlisle, they tell me, is going to produce a tragedy on the story of Dryden's beautiful poem, the Guiscard and Sigismunda.

You are pleased with Colonel Addington, and I am not less delighted with his sister, the elegant, the eloquent, and interesting Mrs Goodenough, with whom I had lately the pleasure of passing a few hours of very rapid wing.

Ah, friend! how political prejudice can betray into uncandid decision the clearest heads and kindest hearts! You perceive I allude to the sentences which close your letter. You say, "If Arthur O'Connor's confessions do not damn Fox and his party, nothing can. If they were dupes, they are not fit to be trusted, for want of judgment; and if they were themselves traitors, still less, as the enemies of their country." Your last if is conclusive-not so your first. You forgot, when you drew your inference, the truth and wisdom of Milton's fine observation, to which the events of your own life have, from the ingenuousness of your temper, borne frequent testi

mony:

"Nor yet, nor man, nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks

Invisible, except to God alone,

By his permissive will, through heaven and earth.
And oft, though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity

Resigns her charge."

That it for once beguiled the clearest sighted of of all our politicians is certain; but if that single instance of dupism can unfit a man, or set of men, for the service of the state, how totally must the so far out-numbering instances in which Mr Pitt has been duped, in the face of all Europe, disqualify him for retaining the reasonable confidence of the people of England!

Adieu! and believe, what is most true, that it is not in the wide difference of our opinion concerning those measures which may best preserve the weal of this country, to alienate from you any portion of my esteem and regard.

LETTER XXVIII.

MISS PONSONBY.

Lichfield, Nov. 15, 1798.

MOST sincerely, dearest Madam, do I sympathize with your and Lady Eleanor's anxieties and sorrows, of triple source, patriotism, consanguinity, and friendship. Ah! wretched Ireland, how dire is the insecurity of thy inhabitants! In other civil wars, barbarities as dreadful have been committed ;-witness that in the Duke of Ormond's time, of which Phelim O'Neale was the Holt;-but when the contest became hopeless, the sanguinary thirst ceased. Now a fiend-like fury prevails-murder for the sake of murder, sparing neither sex, infancy, or age, nor even waiting for the spur of personal revenge.

I see, with the deepest concern, and the most desponding fears for the result, the success of this country's renewed incendiarisms on the continent. Ah, Heaven! is it thus the English nation shews its gratitude to thee for the signal, the glorious victories, with which thou hast blest our fleets! How much more worthy a wise, a humane, a

Christian nation, instead of goading on the emperor to set the existence of the German empire on one desperate cast, to have said to France,"Let the exterminating sword be sheathed. Meet us with reasonable terms of reconcilement, and we will find our noblest pride in shewing you, and the whole world, that our naval victories have not shut our hearts to compassion for the miseries our continued warfare must produce to both nations."

I now hasten to obey your injunction, and speak my sentiments of the poetical merits and defects of that exquisite picture of a transcript, “The Little Grey Man," which you have taken the kind trouble to trace. It has some few pleasing, and some few fine images; but there is so much of ludicrous about the Little Grey Man himself, that I confess I am more inclined to laugh than to shudder at him. Then the course of the tale is so distorted from nature and probability; is so totally void of sentiment or moral, as to induce my belief that it is the poem of which I heard at Buxton, said to be written by Mr Bunbury, in ridicule of the German stories, and the prevailing taste for supernatural horrors. Considered in this light, it is more acceptable to my taste, than if I thought its author in earnest to vie with the terrible graces of Alonzo and Imogen, or of, in