mane attention. We talked of Langollen vale, and its stars. Lady Cork expressed her wishes Should personally to receive their influence. she obtain that happiness, I think it would beam upon her in all its benignity, for I persuade myself that her manners and conversation would interest and please. I have the honour to remain, dearest ladies, &c.* LETTER LXXVIII. MRS CHILDERS. Lichfield, Dec. 27, 1801. SILENCES to each other of involuntary length are mutually our fate, and, well I know, are reciprocally regretted. It would be fruitless to enumerate the causes which co-operated to produce my late taciturnity. Some of them were melancholy ones; so melancholy as to wither, during some days, every power of exertion. You congratulate me upon the peace; and indeed it is well that the mad career of Bellona, miserable for Europe, and ruinous to England, is at last arrested; but the blessing is come much too late to repair the mischiefs of the curse. Though the wide waste of life, and the tears of the surviving mourners may pass away from remembrance, other, and more dangerous miseries, the certain consequence of the needless warfare, will remain, and substitute, for phantom-danger, real peril to the government of this country. The dreadful load of debt it has left, renders it impossible to remove the burden of the taxes, which every class shifts from its own shoulders to those of the class beneath them; the noblemen, and large-estated gentlemen, by raised rents to their tenants; the tenants by monopoly, and the extravagant price they exact for the necessaries of life; and the mercantile world, by evasion protected, by the impossibility of the commissioners calculating the income resulting from their traffic, shift the burden to the lowest order of the people, who pine and perish in want, and incur disease, which spreads contagion over the land. The populace are now looking to peace, and the fruits of the late plenteous harvest, for the return of their comforts. They will find, alas! a bitter disappointment; and when they have lost all hope of redress to their grievances, it is dreadfully probable that they will rush on change, stimulated by the agricultural plenty, the rising commerce, and the increased power of France; and though their efforts will but redouble their wretchedness, they will probably end in long anarchy, and blasted empire. Meanwhile imputed Jacobinism, that stalkinghorse which carried into effect the insane plans of the late ministry, having served its purpose, has, like the fatal steed of Leonora, "Thinn'd, and bleached, and paled, and then I know there are countless beauties in Pamela, yet did I start at your epithet for it, viz. "incomparable," since, on the instant it met my sight, arose to the eye of my mind the Clarissa, and the Grandison; whose immense superiority always induced me to consider Pamela as a dim dawn of the brightest day of imaginative ethics that ever rose upon English literature. 1 spurn the name of novel or romance for such noble compositions. I lately met with a passage in one of Lord Orford's juvenile letters to this effect: "I can send you no news; the late singular novel is the universal, and only theme-Pamela is like snow, she covers every thing with her whiteness." Buxton did nothing for my March injury. During a fortnight of the month I staid there, your favourite and admirer, the classical and elegant Christopher Smith, his learned friend, Mr Booth, and my worthy, and witty, and literary old acquaintance, Colonel Barry, met most afternoons at my lodgings, and shed the light of their talents over the land of strangers. Barry's friend, Colonel Crowder, was there with his beauteous niece, introduced to me by Barry. She often was a fifth in our conversations-the fair Vanessa of the intellectual scene. Smith and I forever regretted you absence. How egregiously has Miss H. More exposed herself to the reproach of that absurd and intolerant methodism with which I have long believed her tainted? I refer you for the proofs to the Anti-Jacobin Review for July last.-Adieu! END OF VOLUME FIFTH. Printed by G. Ramsay & Co. |