edly that of many of our own officers, nursed in the lap of ease and luxury.

O! this horrid, this remorseless war! Infatuated ministry! who have rejected so many opportunities of terminating it, with honour and advantage to this deceived country;—on the taking of Toulon and Valenciennes; on the desertion of Prussia; on the subsidiary claims of the emperor; -yet still they went on, regardless of our exhausted wealth, of the miseries of a bleeding world; floundering deeper and deeper in defeated projects, till the olive, with all its healing blessedness, is perhaps no longer within our reach. Yet it ought to have been tried, if it could have been procured even by the sacrifice of that (no longer great) title, King of France; by the restitution of the Toulon ships, and by the cession of all our foreign conquests, whose advantages are as dust in the balance against the miseries of protracted war. Peace is worth any price to England, short of the reduction of her navy. In another twelvemonth we shall offer the recently rejected terms, and then offer them in vain. So it has been through the whole progress of this mad contest. Nothing but the blindest prejudice can prevent the public from being universally sensible of that melancholy truth.

I have perceived the drowning hopes of Mr

Pitt's adherents catching at the straw respecting English safety, another rupture between France and Spain, regardless of the renewed miseries of the harassed continent.

By stimulating Portugal to break her treaty with a foe she has not power to resist; by stimulating Spain to make a second helpless attempt at resistance, what are the mole-eyed cabinet of England about, but to bring the claim of new enormous subsidies from us, perhaps the claim of auxiliary armies, to be sacrificed as they were in Germany? and, after all, as the event must evidently be (if there is any eye-couching power in experience), to throw both those kingdoms into the absolute power of France, as conquered countries; while, by wiser capitulation, Portugal might retain the power of trading with England.

Lawless power will demonize its possessors in every country. It has demonized the French; but the French character has risen greatly in my estimation, from the exemplary conduct of our late unfortunate prisoners.

Without intending it, I have slid into politics. In a period so momentous, their attraction, to thinking minds of both sexes, is resistless.

LETTER IV.

MRS GELL.

Lichfield, Dec. 3, 1797.

I HAVE lately suffered, during a week, all I underwent in the summer, from a severe return of my hemorrhage. My appearance became again a rival spectacle of horror to "the bloodboltered Banquo," whose visibility the silly foppery of modern refinement has banished from the stage, to the great injury of the noblest tragedy in the world. Absurd!—that our feelings, which tolerate scenic witches, should be revolted by the sight of a scenic ghost.

Do you not pity me?-think of awakening from imperfect slumber, with streams of bood running down my throat, and threatening suffocation, till, on my starting up, they found a less fatal channel, and deluged my pillow! You will conceive that such visitations, by the glimpses of the moon, made the night hideous; but while I have bled, dear Mrs H. has died! I understood that she had obtained the pleasure of your acquaintance. We met at Derby last spring. She then appear

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ed in the strongest-possible health. Never was there a firmer constitution. I have not known her to complain of bodily indisposition. She had a Gallic gaiety of spirit, which the infelicities of her destiny could but transiently, however violently, impede. The short paroxysm of anguish passed, the tide of vivacity returned, and bore down every thing before it.

Nature, after striking off this one singularly characteristic impression, broke the mould in which she made Mrs Hayley.

Fire in her affections, frost in her sensations, she shrunk from the caresses even of the husband she adored. Hence, while she had a morbid degree of tenaciousness respecting his esteem and attention, she was incapable of personal jealousy; and would amuse herself with the idea of those circumstances, with which she could so perfectly well dispense, being engrossed by another.

Alike during the years of their union, and in those of their separation, she gloried in the talents of her bard, as she used to call Mr H., and delighted to praise his virtues, perpetually producing specimens of the first, and giving instances of the latter.

While her heart was warmly attached to the many whom she believed her friends-for to wish and to believe were twin feelings with Mrs H.

while she could not bear, without visible pain and ardent vindication, the slightest word which had a tendency to question their pretensions to talent and virtue; yet, respecting strangers, or acquaintance that did not interest her, she had a quick sense of the ridiculous, which produced very pointed satire ;-but, never tired of placing an absurd speech, or mean action, in new lights of ludicrous exhibition, the fertility of her ima gination counteracted the fine edge of her wit, worked her theme thread-bare, and fatigued her auditors.

With sportive fancy; with no inconsiderable portion of belles-lettres knowledge; with polite address, and an harmonious voice in speaking, and with the grace of correct and eloquent language; with rectitude of principles, unsuspecting frankness of heart, and extreme good humour; she was, strange to say! not agreeable, at least not permanently agreeable. The unremitting attention her manner of conversing seemed to claim; her singular laugh, frequent and excessive, past all proportion to its cause, overwhelmed, wearied, and oppressed even those who were most attached to her; who felt her worth, and pitied her banishment from the man on whom she doated-in whose fame she triumphed, tenacious of its claims, even to the most irritable soreness. Yet her

rage