ing upon the talents, graces, and virtues of that faithful lover, and too intrepid soldier, Major André-that you continue to read my poem on his destiny, and his own letters annexed to it, with melancholy delight. I believe that neither man nor woman, ever loving Honora, could cease to love her. All the dark colour of André's fate took its tint from disappointed and unconquerable attachment to her.

The grand expedition to Holland verifies the prediction of common sense. Our blood-lavish ministry now discover, after having sacrificed so large a part of our fine army, that it was too late in the year for the attempt upon so wet a country, and that the French are in too much force to allow the Dutch to venture a junction with the English and Russians. Here is no counteraction, from events not to be foreseen, to justify such a new waste of blood and treasure. Will no chastizing experience convince our rulers, that England can never send armies to the Continent but to their destruction? All our officers allow that, in despite of English bravery, the French, no less daring, excel us as much in military tactics as we excel them in the naval ones.

I do not think I have, or ever shall have, health to encounter the inevitable hurries of a short residence in London, and a long one would not

suit my convenience. My connections there are now large and complicated, and they would leave me none of that quietness necessary to my impaired constitution; but be assured, that I do not less regret than yourself, the distance which separates us. I wish I could spend a few more weeks with you, either at my house or yours, ere I go hence and be no more seen.— -While I am, I am faithfully your friend.

LETTER XLVI.

THOMAS PARK, ESQ.

Lichfield, Nov. 10, 1799.

I GRIEVE that your plan of visisting me in September with Mrs Park, was arrested,—yet more that it was arrested by disease.

It will give me true satisfaction to learn that your and Mrs Park's lately disordered health is restored. The human frame must have partaken with vegetable nature in the mal-influence of this ungenial year. November, alas! is come, with all its storms, and the wreck of the drowned harvest perishes beneath them. For that and for its

lamentable consequence I mourn; nor less for the sanguinary folly which sent the flower of our army to follow the glimmer of that ignis fatuus loyalty, which delusively played amid the Dutch marshes. Are you not indignant of the cool effrontery with which the ministerial people acknowledge that it was too late in the year for the attempt, and that they did not foresee that France would send such overawing reinforcements to prevent the power of the Stadtholder's friends from daring to manifest its combining principle? Didour rulers expect that France would sleep over our invasion, or imagine that God again,

"As once in Gibeon, and for longer space,
Should interrupt and stop the annual course
Of the undeviating and punctual sun?"

I read last night, in the Evening Mail, a paragraph to the following purport. It was in the conclusion of an absurd eulogium on the Emperor of Russia's mad manifesto, the rival in impolicy of the Duke of Brunswick's in the commencement of this devastating war. "Thus, without any view of parcelling out France, to seat the last of the Bourbon line upon the throne of his ancestors, we are authorized to declare, is henceforth

to be the fixed object, the unalterable purpose of the present war!!"

It flatters me that you so industriously sought, and pleases me that you have procured my monodies, which Dr Darwin used to call the Epic Elegies. Are not dear André's letters, subjoined to the Monody, exquisite specimens of original talents, and fine imagination, adorning the effusions of an impassioned heart?— and are they not lovely in the freshness of untainted youth?

tuous.

You have seen, or, I trust, you will see, Mr Fellowes's beautiful work, which demonstrates that the Christian system wars not with any innocent gratification of the taste or fancy, even of those over which the revived Calvinistic school has thrown the gloom of imputed criminal tendency. Mr F. proves, that where virtue is, they are virHe also removes the great barrier to rational faith, that strange doctrine of original sin, which it is impossible to reconcile to the justice of the Deity. He shews that it is nowhere to be found on the pages of the four Evangelists. It appears to me that questions may be added to his arguments; questions which are conclusive against the doctrine. Did not Adam sin, whom that doctrine supposes to have been created with

out propensity to evil?-nay, did he not sin upon a trifling temptation? Where, then, is the difference between his nature and that of his posterity? Each had trial.

I have grieved for the effect of the late raging winds upon my vegetable family. The vernal pride of my shrubbery, a gelder-rose, ten feet high, and the growth of near twenty years, with a neighbouring lilach, almost as tall, are prostrate. Thus a sloping knowl, which overlooks the lovely vale of Stowe, is denuded. The depredation will cost me a thousand sighs. I loved the snowy pride of my fallen Sylvia; and Cowper's description had yet more endeared her beauty:

"When up she threw, into the darkest gloom
Of neighbouring cypress, or more sable yew,
Her silver globes, light as the foamy surf,
Which the wind severs from the broken wave."

Mr Capel Loft's commendation of my sonnets, in the Critical Review, preceded by that laboured dissertation upon sonnets in general, explaining their construction by Greek terms, is not likely to catch the public attention. The general reader, perceiving himself bewildered in a maze of scholastic technicisms, will not proceed so far as to inform himself whether the strictures approve or