poem of Racine's, his Sur le Religion, yet lingers on your pen. Ah! I shall never again have spirits to attempt a new poetic task; and, besides, you have heard me express my accordance with Dr Johnson's opinion, that moral precepts, religious hopes, and pious ejaculations, have a better effect when they naturally arise out of lighter subjects in poetry, than when they form its professed and exclusive theme. I trust my publications are not destitute of such precepts, hopes, and aspirations. My sonnets have been publickly praised for having liberally involved them.

Then, surely, there is no want of religious poetry in our language. Has Racine enforced any maxims, imparted any hopes, any incentives to piety, any warnings to guilt, which may not be found in Milton, Young, and Cowper ?—or has he illustrated them with powers of imagination superior to theirs? If not, a translation of his work, however spirited, would be superfluous. What lover of poesy, whose taste is rightly tempered, would choose to drink the waters of life from an under current, sluiced off from a Gallic fountain of papal faith, when they might draw them from their purer source in protestant principles and British genius!

I confess that opinions may be found in Godwin's writings, which deserve severe censure;―

but then, surely, there is so much truth, important to the morality, the justice, and the welfare of mankind, on his highly ingenious pages, that the unprejudiced reader would be sorry to see them fall into indiscriminate reprobation. St Leon has a noble moral, justifying the ways of God to man; and it appears to me, that the jaundiced eye of prejudice only can espy evil tendency in any part of that fine composition. I know our public critics abuse it with the same violence with which they stigmatized his really exceptionable writings. They are of that very numerous class who, having once detected a writer in error, conclude every thing he writes must be erroneous. They know not how to separate the dross from the gold.

Our great and truly religious poet, Milton, published in defence of regicidism, under certain provocation given by a monarch to his people; such provocation as Charles the First certainly gave; and he published also a defence of conjugal repudiation for causes of temper solely, and asserted the husband's right to marry again where the wife had violated her vow of obedience. On the ground of those two publications, he was almost universally condemned as an impious and immoral writer, and his glorious poetry sunk into neglect and disrepute during seventy-five years. Dr Johnson, even in those later days, could not

shake off that prejudice against Milton's intentions, goodness of heart, and piety, which had disappeared from every other mind.

Adieu! Say kind things in your domestic circle for the poor prisoner, who now commits to your indulgent patience her sighs for the loss of local liberty. Let me have your prayers for the restoration of my injured limb, and for the resignation of my spirit under all the chastisements of Heaven.

LETTER LXIV.

REV. R. FELLOWES.

Lichfield, June 1, 1801.

FREQUENT ill health, and a severe personal accident, threatening to prove an incurable maim, has kept me long silent to a letter, in whose narrow bounds much ingenuity and just poetic taste are contained; but it speaks of unfitness for company, from mental business and depressed spirits. Intellectual energy and heart-sick dejection are seldom compatible, except under the goad of im

perious necessity. Since you wrote that letter, I hope you have experienced the usual power of employment to banish care and dispel anxiety; employment so worthy of your talents, your heart, and your literary fame, over which the absurd and groundless censures of envious bigotry have cast no enduring cloud.

Such and so high is my esteem for your genius and your judgment, that I feel a certain pride and triumph of mind, whenever my opinions, religious, moral, or literary, are sanctioned by your coincidence. You demonstrate, in the letter before me, the justice of my favourite assertion concerning the superiority of Gray to Pindar, as a lyric poet; and you establish it on the eternal immutable principles of truth and reason. When, through the warp of prejudice, Taste forsakes them, as she sometimes does, even in the strongest minds, she must substitute declamation for analytic comparison, and verbal partiality, with its false lights, for the due perception of those intrinsic graces, in which the imagination delights, and which the understanding hallows.

I think myself highly honoured by your purpose of mentioning me favourably in the notes to your next publication. Praise from such a pen is fame.

Your domiciliary allegory for the Night Thoughts and the Task, charms me. It is exquisitely imagined.

How curious it is that Dr Young, whose great work is so deeply sombre, should have been always cheerful and often jocund in conversation,

"A brow solute, and ever-laughing eye;"

while Cowper, in the production by which he can alone be considered as a poet of eminence, amidst satire no less severely serious, courts his Penates with absolute sunshine of spirit, though it is well known that his bosom was, during long periods, a very Erebus. Its darkness is visible in his rhyme compositions, which, as poetry, are such very moderate performances.

Still does it appear to me, that the very luxury of mental contentment is the master-tint of the Task. It is true its second book opens beneath a cloud of misanthropy; but it seems to have been spread by just reflection on the cruelty of man to his species, and to be wholly unmixed with self-dissatisfaction. Should you favour me with another letter, I will thank you to point out those passages in the Task, which suggested your idea of " the breaking or broken heart of its author."