the period of our commonwealth, would strongly prognosticate the return of monarchy in France, if the short-sighted jealousy of neighbouring governments would, by forbearance, leave France at leisure to perceive how incompetent such struggling, vexing sway, to remedy the evils of crowned despotism. While France is fighting for what she believes will be liberty, she can never feel to purpose that, as it has been, so it must ever be an empty name, amid the throes of elective rule. Your glowing encomium on my embryo epic* would be powerful to stimulate its progress, if this oppressive malady in my head did not combine with the claims upon my attention, verbal and epistolary, to arrest its course. Nor less am I flattered by what you say on the subject of my little poem on the future existence of brutes. Whenever my miscellany appears, it will be found in that collection. It will probably induce the bigots to load its author with invective. I should not wonder if this my avowal of the claims upon Divine Justice of suffering innocence, in every class of being, to hereafter compensation, should induce them to declare me infidel. Nothing is too absurd, too self-evidently false for that spirit of gloomy enthusiasm, and pharisaic calumny, which stalks *Telemachus.-S. abroad amongst us, under high authority, layic and sacerdotal. It is not less injurious to cheerful piety and rational Christianity, than are the atheistical and deistical tenets of what is called modern philosophy. Its pernicious teachers are the spawn of Epicurus, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. You are not of either school. You believe and obey Him, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light. O may I, and all I love, endeavour to obey his precepts, nor find our trust in the mercy of our Creator vain! LETTER XLVIII. THOS. PARK, Esq. Lichfield, Jan. 30, 1800. A PASSAGE in your last letter gave me an electric degree of surprise. In my first startled wonder, and without waiting to finish your letter, I rushed to my volume of Chatterton's poems, to find those lines in the elegy on Philips, which the personification of winter in one of my sonnets so much resembles. My volume of Chatterton's poems came out in 1778. I always believed it contained every thing he had published or left behind him. I remember to have seen some of the short poems which are there collected, in the magazines during my youth. This volume of miscellanies contains no elegy on Philips, nor have any of its compositions the lines you quote. Certainly the resemblance between Chatterton's personification of winter and mine are too strong to have been the result of coincidence, and must be unconscious plagiarism, and that on my part. 1 conclude this elegy was printed in some of the magazines during its author's lifetime; that it there met my eye, and this its picture of winter impressed my imagination, though I iost, as years rolled on, my recollection of its source. Disposed to write a sonnet on winter, I conclude some features of Chatterton's impersonization of that season came forward, from the large deposit of English poetry in my brain, and rendered me an unconscious plagiarist. Long before the fame of this miraculous creature had gone abroad, the verses which appeared with his name in the magazines, and with a brief account of the obscurity of his birth, and his entire deprivation of literary instruction, had inspired my youthful mind with conviction of the magnitude of his genius, so finely, of late years, eulogized by Mr Coleridge in the following lines: "Britannia's boast, the wond'rous boy, Soon after the volume above mentioned appeared, I spoke of its author to Johnson, with the warmest tribute of my admiration; but he would not hear me on the subject, exclaiming,— "Pho, child! don't talk to me of the powers of a vulgar uneducated stripling. He may be another Stephen Duck. It may be extraordinary to do such things as he did, with means so slender; -but what did Stephen Duck do, what could Chatterton do, which, abstracted from the recollection of his situation, can be worth the attention of learning and taste? Neither of them had opportunities of enlarging their stock of ideas. No man can coin guineas, but in proportion as he has gold." Though Chatterton had been long dead when Johnson began his Lives of the English Poets; though this stupendous miscellany had then been some time before the world; though its contents 6 had engaged half the literati of the nation in controversy, yet would not Johnson allow Chatterton a place in those volumes in which Pomfret and Yalden were admitted. So invincible were his grudging and surly prejudices-enduring long-deceased genius but ill-and contemporary genius not at all. The great Thomas Warton has, in his edition of Milton's lesser works, instanced, on almost every page, passages of as striking resemblance to Milton's poetic predecessors in English verse, as the opening of my twenty-seventh sonnet to a passage in Chatterton. From the riches of Milton's imagination, I should suppose that these resemblances, too precise for coincidence, were also involuntary plagiarisms. The involuntary plagiarisms from English poetry, in those compositions of Chatterton's, which he wished to impose upon the public for ancient, formed one of the strongest proofs by which Mr T. Warton, Mr Mason, and Horace Walpole were enabled to pronounce them modern. Exemption from involuntary plagiarisms, to which every writer, conversant in poetry, is subject, affords proof as strong of the ancientry of the Ossianic compositions. It is true, the desolation of Balclutha resembles that of Nineveh in Isaiah, but, I think, not in a degree beyond possible coincidence;-and there is also another |