nal friend of my youth. The sonnet is an order of verse, favourable above most others to the effusions of the heart. It enables the poet to arrest fleeting impressions, and to preserve them in their first vivid glow; impressions which else would probably vanish, or if laid by for future use in the memory, would grow faint and cold in the comparison, ere they could be enwoven with other matter, and in a longer work.

Your fidelity to your Horatian promise*, delights me almost as much in the contemplation, as those successful efforts of grateful zeal, which procured ease and affluence to a learned and worthy man.

Repeatedly, since I received your last letter, have I imagined the mutual happiness of that interview, when unexpectedly calling upon you some years after you were established as a British merchant, he found you in the act of performing your votive classic duty. Nor know I which most to admire, the master who enjoined the task,

* The ingenious preceptor of this excellent man's schooldays enjoined him, on their separation, to promise that he would read an ode of Horace every day, during the ensuing twenty years. Mr Sykes of West-Eila, is second son to a Sir Christopher Sykes, ancestor to the present Sir Christopher. He has been a prosperous and liberal merchant, beloved and respected by his large family, and by all who knew him.—S.

which was to preserve your literary acquirements, and poetic taste, or the fidelity of the pupil, who suffered not the pressing claims of an extensive commerce to impede its performance.

Sir B. Boothby sent me, in manuscript, the elegy on your late illustrious friend, Mr Mason, which you kindly offer to transmit. I liked it very much; but I did not like Dr Darwin's epitaph upon him. It is, or, at least when I saw it, it was without simplicity, pathos, or piety; fine picture, and only fine picture. Dr Darwin's principles incapacitate him for writing epitaphs as they ought to be written. That on Mrs French, in the Botanic Garden, is yet more exceptionable. It talks of Beauty pleading at the throne of God, -as if the Maker of the universe had partialities to female charms, like those imputed to the fabled Jupiter.

Adieu my dear paternal friend-may your life be Jengthened to the last possibility of its comfort,

"Whose peaceful day benevolence endears,
Whose night congratulating conscience clears,"

LETTER XL.

COLIN MACKENZIE, Esq. of Edinburgh.

Lichfield, June 2, 1799. .

FROM the time your priceless packet came, I have been, at frequent intervals, absorbed in Mr Scott's wonderfully fine epic ballad. Not one of the beautiful ballads in Percy's Collection is so interesting. I instantly committed it to memory. As Antony says of Cleopatra, it is of all hours. Glenfinlas* is for the initiated, but the Eve of St John agitates the dull dead-calm of unpoetic bosoms, while, to spirits rightly touched, infinite is its power to thrill and to impress.

You know there are two St Johns; but I conclude this is the Eve of the winter, rather than the summer saint, as the season so much better harmonizes with the finely obscure horrors of the scene, than would the softer hours of a summer night.

The dreary flame of the beacon on the wild

See latter part of the letter to the same gentleman, dated Feb. 3d 1799, for mention of that very fine poem.-S.

lone hill, flaring to the wind, is a feature wholly new in poetic scenery. Its fierce red light, amid the solitude which surrounds it, is dismal "as the darkness visible" of Pandemonium itself: and charming in their lovely locality, are the landscapes of Melrose, and afterwards of Tiviotdale. The last, so totally unexpected, is the " sunny island in the stormy main," so much is its selfbeauty increased by the contrasted objects and feelings which precede and succeed to it.

The only circumstance not original in this impressive poem, is the grasp of the apparition, and the ribbon thereafter worn on the scorched and withered wrist. That is taken from the awful tradition of Lord Tyrone's spectre in the chamber of Lady Berresford.

There appears one little oversight in this bal

lad:

"Who spilleth life shall forfeit life,
So bid thy lord believe,”

says the spirit. The baron's destiny does not accomplish that prediction. The silence of the severe monastic order, La Trappe, is not death. At the time the scene is laid, I conclude the feudal power of the barons was above the laws; but his suicide would fulfil the pro

phecy; and if committed on the beacon-hill, would allow a recurrence of that novel object in the close, which might have a fine effect. The lady's criminal infidelity to her husband is justly punished in her expiatory darkness; but suppose the two* concluding stanzas were thus extended to four :

In three more years the rage of war
The beacon hills relight,

The rain falls fast, the wild winds roar
Loud on yon guilty height†.

Whose on the death-tree, scath'd and bare,'

Whose is that perish'd form,

Reveal'd, at times, by the red flare,

Unquench'd by rain or storm?

There is a nun in Melrose bower

That never sees the sun;
There is a monk in Dryburgh tower,
That speaketh word to none.

The nun that never sees the day,
The monk that speaks to none:
That nun is Smaylhome's lady gay,
That monk the bold baron."

↑ The beacon-hill had been the place of assignation between the baron's lady and the knight he murdered in his jealousy.—S