tended, because my surgeon and we are all convinced, that it does not contain a single grain of mustard, and is merely oil of turpentine tinged with saffron, or something of that colour. Yet I think it has been of use to me, and, therefore, what it is matters little.

I am extremely interested in all you say of Thomson and his Seasons*. Nothing, in the study of the poetic art, could delight me more than to have the opportunity of which you availed yourself—than to trace, by comparing the first

*Extract from Mr Park's letter. "I very lately met with the early copies of the Seasons, as they were separately published; and from them I learn, that Thomson improved and polished his poetry with the skill and indefatigable diligence of Pope. These copies differ as much from the collected edition in 1730, as that does from its expanded successor in 1746. Dr Johnson hesitates to pronounce whether, in these subsequent editions, the poems did not lose their race in flavour. This appears equally strange with many other of that learned critic's critical enigmas. It is hardly possible that he could speak from actual comparison, since Summer and Winter appear mere school-boy efforts, after perusing the modern copies. But it is always an interesting exercise to compare the first sketches of a great master with his finished productions. Winter, instead of being disregarded, as tradition reports, passed through four editions soon after publication; a success that, with all its excellence, I do not think it would have obtained in the present day. Pope subscribed for three sets of the former edition, in the year 1730.”—S.

edition of the Seasons with the two last, printed with corrections, under his own eye, in 1750, and 1746-than to trace, in that comparison, the rising powers of the poet's fancy and judgment.

The only instance I know, where a fine poetic writer has injured in attempting to improve his compositions, is Akenside. I have the first edition of his Pleasures of Imagination, written between his twentieth and thirtieth year, bound up with his last altered edition, published in middle life. The poem, in its altered state, has indeed lost an immense portion" of its race in flavour." It seems, that the cold precision of mathematic studies, had not only dampt the fires of its author's fancy, but had rendered his judg

ment obtuse.

For Dr Johnson's having, to the disgrace of his judgment, pronounced, or rather suggested, the same censure on Thomson's alterations of his Seasons, by which they acquired a superiority so immense, I can thus account: He read them, on their first appearance, before his own sensibility of poetic beauty became warpt and blunted by literary jealousy and envy. He looked into the later editions, not read them, when those passions, so often the bane of authors, and, of all authors, most his bane, had jaundiced the native health of his mind. He remembered the pleasure with

which he had, in his youth, perused the earlier copies, and falsely placed to the poet's account that future palled and sickly perception, to which the meridian of Thomson's genius could not impart the delight, which its fainter dawn had inspired, when his own mind and taste were pure.

After Johnson rose himself into fame, it is well known that he read no other man's writings, liv ing or dead, with that attention without which public criticism can have no honour, or, indeed, common honesty. If genius flashed upon his maturer eyes, they ached at its splendour, and he cast the book indignantly from him. All his familiarity with poetic compositions, was the result of juvenile avidity of perusal; and their various beauties were stampt upon his mind, by a miraculous strength and retention of memory. The wealth of poetic quotation in his admirable Dictionary, was supplied from the hoards of his early years. They were very little augmented afterwards.

In subsequent periods, he read verse, not to appreciate, but to depreciate its excellence. His first ambition, early in life, was poetic fame; his first avowed publication was in verse. Disappointed in that darling wish, indignant of less than first-rate eminence, he hated the authors, preceding or contemporary, whose fame, as poets, eclipsed his own. In writing their lives, he gra

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tified that dark passion, even to luxury. The illiberal propensity of mankind in general, to be gratified by the degradation of eminent talents, favoured his purpose. Wit and eloquence gilded injustice, and it was eagerly swallowed*.

Thomson lived in better times. There were, doubtless, many as willing, but none so able as Johnson, to spread the Gothic mantle over poetic taste. Verse, even superior to Thomson's,

Miss Seward's strictures, in this and some of the preceding letters, on Dr Johnson's character as a critic, may, to many readers, appear perhaps to be carried too far: yet they have lately received a sanction from a writer of the highest authori ty, whose candour is no less cospicuous than his penetration or his eloquence, and whose situation precludes him from all suspicion of being here influenced by local prejudices. It is in the following fine strain of moral indignation that Mr Stewart expresses himself upon this subject.

"Among our English poets, who is more vigorous, correct, and polished than Dr Johnson, in the few poetical compositions which he has left? Whatever may be thought of his claims to originality of genius, no person who reads his verses can deny that he possessed a sound taste in this species of composition; and yet how wayward and perverse, in many instances, are his decisions, when he sits in judgment on a political adversary, or when he treads on the ashes of a departed rival! To myself (much as I admire his great and various merits, both as a critic and as a writer), human nature never appears in a more humiliating form, than when I read his Lives of the Poets; a performance which exhibits a more faithful, expressive, and curious

would not thus speed through multiplied editions

now.

The dire and inevitable consequences of this crusading and subsidizing war, are beginning to press heavily on the people. Requisition is commenced. Mr Pitt may have occasion to rue the obstinate and unwarned rashness by which he has put the safety of these realms into peril so imminent. Yet the demonstrated Quixotism of his attempts to balance the power of Europe, at a price so ruinous to Great Britain, did not prevent their being sanctioned by a large majority of the people of property. They could not be taught to feel that momentous truth, viz. that public distress and poverty, resulting from the exactions of the state, form the real and sole cause of overturned empires. In their approbation of measures that must bring on these exactions, they shook the pillars of ours, far more dangerously

picture of the author, than all the portraits attempted by his biographers; and which, in this point of view, compensates fully, by the moral lessons it may suggest, for the critical errors which it sanctions. The errors, alas! are not such as any one who has perused his imitations of Juvenal can place to the account of a bad taste; but such as had their root in weaknesses, which a noble mind would be still more unwilling to acknowledge."- -Philosophical Essays, by Dugald Stewart, Esq. p. 491.