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A young clergyman of any judgment might stock himself for life with excellent sermons formed from these pages.

May the nation prove worthy of gifts so precious to its best welfare!-but I much fear that it will not; all the leading reviews are in the hands either of Calvinists or dissenters. The first will load your pure writings with redoubled obloquy; the second will, with less acrimony, feel, but with some petulant soreness, the strength of your argument against separating from the established church for trivial reasons.

Such people may retard the rising fame of the noblest compositions from the infallibility with which the undiscerning many invest the decisions of reviewers; but truth and genius, by the aid of time, by the necessarily slow accumulation of the suffrages of those few, in every age and period, who are unwarped by interest, prejudice, or envy, will be enabled to disperse each shrouding mist, which, for an interval, obscures their beams.

LETTER LXXVII.

LADY ELEANOR BUTLER AND MISS PON

SONBY.

Lichfield, Dec. 20, 1801.

MOST kind, dearest ladies, is that attention, of which the precious, though melancholy, proofs lie before me. I cannot persuade myself to delay the united acknowledgments of Mr Saville and myself, even till the sad certainty is ours of the impending fatality at Dinbren. We are both very uneasy about the hopeless state of its hospitable warm-hearted mistress; and Mr S. is himself in a state of health to which inquietude and sorrow are very formidable.

The distress of poor Mr Roberts' mind has probably prevented his communication of my last letter, describing the dire alarm which the first of this month brought us for the life of Mr Saville, whose worth you so well know. It has left a sense of alarm and dread upon my mind, which perhaps will never leave it, though the immediate peril passed away; and though, with some drawbacks, he has continued amending;

but my fear of a relapse withers my exertion, and I sink, amongst many claims, into almost epistolary bankruptcy.

Then I grieve for dear Mr Whalley's irreparable loss, not only in a wife, so justly dear to him, but in the means of obtaining a continuance of those expensive elegancies in his style of living, which long habit has rendered necessary to his comforts. I fear his wane of life will severely feel the inconvenience and deprivation resulting from the Quixotic generosity of his youth, when, as I have been informed, lest the world should think and say, and lest his beloved Mrs Sherwood should suspect, that his attachment was mercenary, he would not marry her till she had settled upon her own relations, after her death, all her maiden fortune*, except an annuity of L. 200. Her considerable jointure must drop with her.

The worst of it is, that the few people, capable of heroic disdain of the auri sacra fames, are exactly those who can the least dispense with those gratifications, of which gold is the source.

Mr Roberts is of that class, though his expenses, in comparison with those of my friends, Sir Brooke Boothby and Mr Whalley, are as the

*Mrs Whalley was heiress to an affluent fortune.

morn-dew on the myrtle leaf to that stream of expense down which they have sailed.

Ah! poor Mrs Roberts-probably, ere this hour, that ardent and honest and generous heart of hers is cold and insensate; that open countenance, over which, when unruffled by vexation, such varying gleams of comic fancy perpetually played, dispens ing mirth and heart's-ease to all around her, is now rigid, stern, immoveable, never, never to smile again! And Mrs Whalley too, in a gentler, quieter way, was arch and amusing, and most genuinely good. Thus do our friends drop around us, till, if we ourselves live long, it is to look through eyes dimmed by tears at a busy bustling world, peopled with strangers.

I am pleased that my poem, The Lake, was acceptable to you, whose scenic taste is so vivid, inventive, and distinguished. I expect to find Southey's odd lyric epic full of genius, however wild and irregular, since it has been twice perused by the Lady Eleanor and her friend; and since it is destined to the high honour of a place in their library.

They are kind in saying that they hope I shall soon read it there; but my imbecility is so much increased by the accident of last March; my spirits are so alarmed and depressed, as to inspire the apprehension that the pleasures of Langollen

vale may not again be mine. I have also internal sensations, which tell me my days will be few, and passed disconsolately; but let not my gloomy prognostics obtrude themselves where I wish to impart nothing but pleasure!

We trust Mr Roberts will not be obliged to leave Dinbren; but, when it is naked of its mistress, a degree of mental desolation will be felt by all who revisit that noble mountain, and have experienced her cordial welcome on its brow.

Mr Saville and his daughter present their grateful compliments. The former assures you, that, if life and tolerable health are granted him, he will execute your commissions, next spring, with glad alacrity,

"And train the vernal scions for their growth."

Lady Cork was at my house a day and a half this week. She is very friendly to me, and has much sprightliness, energy of character, and genuine wit. A stranger countess was a formidable business to the weak spirits of Mr S., which he had no design to encounter. But she declared she would see and converse with him. She sent her message that his sole alternative was to come down to dinner, or permit her to dine in his apartment. She prescribed to him with hu

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