dance and variety of our fine blank verse, is the first and grandest boast of English poetry;-no two species of which demands a more different style than the dramatic and the descriptive, which this critic so absurdly couples. Akenside is a fine writer; but so far from being an echo of Milton, that no measures of blank verse can be more dissimilar. Then what a but about Thomson!!! It is like the Lincolnshire fen-man, who, when Mr Sneyd asked him how he liked the country about Wolesley Bridge, said, "Not at all; here is nothing but hills, and dales, and rocks, and rivers, and woods."

Then what a Midas-assertion, that Thomson has no music in his numbers! Occasional harsh

ness there must be in so long a composition as the Seasons, but the numbers are varied and harmonious even to luxury. It is no wonder than an ear and judgment, so dull as to be insensible of their mingled grandeur and sweetness, should forget the blank verse of Otway, of Young, of Mason, of Cowper, of Crowe, and of Jephson.

I did not recollect that Pope had ever called his muse names. In the instance you have quoted, he was as ungrateful as a certain friend of mine, who believed the reviewers rather than Thomas Warton. In respect to your question. "Can there be too much real or any affected humility

in speaking of my own verses, when I think of the great poets this nation has produced?" I reply,

-that in the poetic house there are many mansions in the poetic heaven many orbits. Jupiter and Venus are not so bright as the sun, yet there is no justice in saying they are not brighter than farthing candles;—and would you blot them from the hemisphere?—I remain, &c.

LETTER XXXVIII.

MISS PONSONBY.

Lichfield, May 21, 1799.

AMIDST all that carries sweetness to my

heart

in the letter with which you have lately honoured me, I sigh to perceive its first page shadowed over with the gloom of regret. Justly do you observe, dearest Madam, consanguinity and friendship are less often than they ought, synonymous terms. When they prove so, separation is very grievous, even though local distance had long prevented the frequency of personal intercourse. The impossibility of its renewal, the never, never more! is an afflicting consciousness.

I thank heaven, yourself, and Lady Eleanor, possess in the sense, hourly, ocular, and audible, of each other's existence, a healing balm for every wound which the resistless dart can inflict on objects of secondary dearness.

A little time will now put me in possession of the Plays on the Passions. I had rather read a new work before I purchase it; but there is no borrowing these dramas here; yet I see they have interested my charming friends of the Cambrian vale, and have therefore every confidence that they will interest me. My literary friend and correspondent, Mrs Jackson, whose taste is highly just and discriminating, also speaks of them in a style which creates considerable predilection.

After giving her reasons for preferring Count Basil to the general favourite, Count de Montford, she says: "Before their author was known, I observed so much of the power and defects of Mrs Radcliffe's compositions in these dramas, as to believe them hers; and I hear she owns them. Mrs Radcliffe, in whatever she writes, attentive solely to the end, is not sufficiently attentive to observe probability and unity of character in the meaus she uses to attain it. She bends her plan, or, if it will not bend, she breaks it to her catastrophe, instead of making the catastrophe grow Still she always out of the preceding events.

takes strong hold of her reader's feelings; and effects her purpose boldly, if not regularly. Her descriptive talent, used to satiety in her novels, is here employed with more temperance, and consequently to better purpose."

In this critique, dear Miss Ponsonby, you will perceive the strength of my excellent Mrs Jackson's understanding, and the discrimination of her judgment.

What a heterogeneous compound is the Oberon, of sportive fancy and grotesque humour! of occasional sublimity, and continually occurring vulgarness of expression and idiom! It is the wildest production of the wild German school, which so industriously seeks to lead us back to our nurseries; their ghosts, their fiends, and their fairies. The numbers in the translation want easy flow, and harmonic roundness.

Truly Jack the Piper is come to great honour to have his Tarantula means of punishment adopted, not only in Caliph Vathec, that witty rival of Voltaire's tales, but in this allegoric epic, which aspires to emulate Spencer.

In two reviews, which lately fell in my way, I saw unqualified praise lavished upon the morality of this motely Oberon.-Curious is the encomium. From its sensual voluptuousness of description, I declare I scarcely know the book I

would not sooner put into the hands of ingenuous youth. Lewis's Monk, so mercilessly abused for imputed immorality in its luxuriance, is almost an icicle in the comparison. The descriptions which are of that species in Oberon, we find more frequent, more highly coloured, more discriminate than in the Monk, or than any which can be found in Rousseau's Eloisa. Ah! with how much more justice may the censure Voltaire passed upon that novel be applied to Oberon! "Its author is an empiric, who poisons our souls for the glory of curing them, and the poison will work violently on the passions, and the antidote will operate only on the understanding." In Oberon the outline, the poetic justice of the punishment is moral, but the interior parts abound with the most lavish fuel to refined sensuality; the only sensuality which can be dangerous to amiable young people.

It was a strange fancy to make the exordium utterly unintelligible till after we have read the whole. Instead of preparing us for the poem, the poem must prepare us for the exordium.

Surely the translator wants taste, so totally to exclude every thing like, what is called by painters, keeping in the style. Florid and elevated language, perpetually interspersed with such words and phrases as-old boozer-safe and sound