paraphrazed. His Monody on Mr Hanbury has many passages of great poetic beauty.

With affectionate devoirs to Lady Eleanor, and every sense of grateful attachment to you both, I remain, dearest Madani, &c.

LETTER VIII.

MRS JACKSON of Turville-Court.

Lichfield, Feb. 13, 1798.

PERFECTLY am I aware, my dear friend, that the paths you have lately trod were very thorny. The warpt structure of the human mind is generally sure to unveil its deformity when pecuniary interest and just principle point different ways. To a mind generous as yours, it is most irksome when instances of selfish depravity are forced upon the attention. That the conflict is past, that justice has fought successfully on your side, my whole heart rejoices.

I entirely comprehend those seeming opposites in your temperament, so well discriminated on pages before me. In circumstances not very momentous, you would rather endure the depre

the

dations of selfishness than disturb your tranquillity by contest, and the irksome investigation of human unworthiness. But, with abilities like yours, there must be potent energies, however they may slumber;-energies which, once roused, are capable of the most active resistance. Though they have triumphed, and you wish to procure for them their constitutional balmy slumber, it may not perhaps be suddenly in your power to lull them. If they have been victorious, they have also been wounded, and the soreness may possibly remain some time; but it will never become, as in many dispositions it might, a misanthropic induration.No your heart overflows too plentifully with the milk of human kindness for such a consequence.

Now is the period in your existence, when maternal anxieties most crowd and press upon the heart,

"When youth, elate and gay,
Steps into life."

Ah! what a proof of the depraved laxness of general morals, when the universities are become scenes of more temptations to indolence, sensuality, and extravagance, than even the army itself! -yet so it is. I wonder not, however, that you

son;

sigh over the choice of the sword for a beloved —nor yet that, on a balance of dangers, you find yielding to the ardent bias of a young mind of the lordly sex, the least.

It is consoling that the conduct of your eldest son, and his inclinations, coincide with your own, and that your girl and youngest boy are so promising. Miss Jackson attains the age of companionship. Much more comfort, much less anxiety results to a mother from female than from male children; since, "in the morn and liquid dew of youth," she can much better guard them from contagious blightings.

Turville-Court is not of very formidable distance. Is it impossible, or rather, would it be very inconvenient for you and Miss Jackson to circle hither on your way to Bath this spring? If obstacles can be subdued, announce to me the welcome victory, and enable me to make short count of the intervening period.

Finding the active medicinal waters above all drugs, vegetable and mineral, salutary to the longinherent maladies of my frame, I must dedicate the meridian of the year to a residence near them. I am become a sad valetudinarian, with every appearance of health and strength. Of a course of dinners later than three o'clock, my injured digestion soon perceives the ill-consequence;

and if I cannot walk my two allotted miles diurnally, either in or out of doors, I become extremely indisposed-yet for such people as myself, in whom Health, Juno-like, dresses up a cloud in her semblance, there is little belief or pity when they complain. All of our class must die before our acquaintance, or even our friends, will think our disorders real.

My summer's excursion will not commence before the end of June. I wish it may, ere that period, be allowed me to bask in the intelligence of your eyes, in the benevolence of your smile, in the soundness of your understanding, and in the play of your fancy. So, for me, should the roses of friendship precede the roses of Flora.

Mrs Godwin's death shocked and concerned me-though I had no personal acquaintance with her.

Why did she die?--I mean by what disorder? she was young-and surely there must have been great strength of constitution as well as of spirit, when friendless and unprotected, and with a young infant at her breast, she roamed the northern regions of the continent! It is curious, that, after acknowledging herself to be a mother, she should sign herself by her maiden name, Wolstencroft, in a subsequent publication, without accounting for the peculiarity; nor less curious that

the author of the Rights of Woman, should, beneath the sense of inflicted cruelty, perfidy, and ingratitude, give way to those expressions of passionate and desponding tenderness, which we find so frequent in her tour. If her system could not steel her own heart, as it seeks to fortify that of her sex in general, we should at least have expected her to conceal the weakness, whose disclosure evinces the incompetence of all her maxims.

Mr Whalley has not written to me since I addressed you last, I therefore know not if he persists in the design of offering his play for representation. The fashion of the times is so hostile to tragedy, that a fine one has no chance of being welcomed; and the combined ignorance and arrogance of modern criticism on poetic subjects, has, as you well observe, a repulsive influence on the resolution of genius to publish its effusions. These delectable properties are finely displayed at the close of the Analytic Review for last month, where Pope is pronounced no poet, nothing more than an ingenious versifier; and the disrepute, into which it says his works are falling, is a proof of the critical acumen of the present period!!! It pronounces Gray and Mason creatures of art merely; -that this age has had no poetic felicity, and exempts only from the Gothic dullness of that decision, Darwin, Cowper, Burns, Mrs Barbauld,