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your fancy, and of your heart, or to the flowing sweetness of your verse *. We find all those rules observed by your juvenile muse, without any sentences of harsh inversion, any quaint phrases, or incongruous mixture of obsolete and Spenserian words.

I have published several from my Centenary of

* See Sonnets, published by Robson and Clarke, New Bond Street-their author, Mr Cary, then only sixteen years old. They are strictly legitimate, and confute every idle objection that can be made to that order of verse, by the grace and ease of their numbers. The 10th of those Sonnets is here inserted as a specimen.

To Mr THOMAS LISTER.

Deem not the muse officious, if thy brow

With her plain wreath to twine she fondly tries,
Since, though Art marshalls not the varying dyes,
Yet nature, sure, will bid the colours glow.
Up the steep hill we, arm in arm, will go :

The hill of life-whether dark tempests rise,
Or golden suns illume the laughing skies.
Thus oft we fram'd the amicable vow,
What time the friendly star of evening pale,

That o'er the dim grove casts its silver gleam,
Led our slow footsteps down the devious vale.--
O! may these scenes prove no illusive dream!
Nor let our simple lives together fail
To flow, one lucid and unruffled stream !—S.

Sonnets, which, for their hour of publication, awaits the return of public tranquillity, if it ever returns, to this nation, too justiy alarmed by the approach of dangers it has provoked. I dare assert, that the regularity of their construction, after rules deduced from the Miltonic sonnet, is free from all the laboured harshness which Coleridge falsely supposes attached to that order of verse. What nonsense men of genius will sometimes talk!

But what say you to his strange inconceivable preference of Schiller's terrible graces to Shakespeare's?!!—as if the agonized feelings of Lear, houseless amid the peltings of the midnight tempest, uttering curses on his children, wrung from his tortured heart by filial ingratitude, was not a subject of as sublime and heart-piercing horror as the cry of a famished man, at midnight, from a cavern into which he had been thrown by a cruel son. Mr C. attributes approachless sublimity to that single circumstance-wishing that he had invented it--and died, that nothing less tremendous in conception might stamp him mortal. Let him open the thrilling pages of Lear, and he will find multiplied touches of as soul-harrowing horror and woe.

His assertion, in a note, page 88, of the unrivalled powers, among the poets of the present day, of Wordsworth's muse in poetic essentialities, in

duced me instantly to send for his poems. I was extremely surprised, for it was a name I had not once heard of, though I find his poems had been published some time. This superiority which Coleridge assigns to them, is just as founded as the asserted superiority, of Schiller to Shakespeare. Wordsworth has genius-but his poetry is harsh, turgid, and obscure. He is chiefly a poetic landscape painter-but his pictures want distinctness. It is strange that Mr C. should, in that note, attribute originality to Wordsworth's expression, green radiance, for the light of the glow-worm. That light is perfectly stellar, and Ossian calls the stars green in twenty parts of his poetry, translated and published, before Wordsworth, who is a very young man, was in existence.

I who had always, since I first in childhood began to observe the characteristic appearances of the objects of nature, seen the stars and the glowworm effusing greenish beams, wondered, on my introduction to the muses, to find none of their votaries pointing out that tinge in the lustre of some of the largest and brightest, and in the light of the glow-worm. When Ossian came out, in my early youth, I was charmed to find him confirming, by his epithet green for the stars, the accuracy of my visual perception. The following lines are in my Langollen Vale':

"While glow-worm lamps effuse a pale green light,
Such as in mossy lanes illume the starless night."

Coleridge, like most other good poets, uses the compound epithet very lavishly, aware, no doubt, of its power to condense sense, and to present poetic picture with suddenness and force. He pretends, in his preface to this the second edition of his poems, that, in compliment to the reviewers, he has abridged the number of his compound epithets. That surely could not be, considering the great plenty of them in this same second edition. He was certainly laughing at the critics by the mock humility of this unreal lopping.

Charles Lamb, several of whose poems are in this volume, is of the school of Coleridge, Southey, and Lloyd, and no contemptible disciple— but while he imitates, he does not equal them. Adieu !

LETTER X.

REV. F. JAUNCEY.

Lichfield, March 13, 1798.

You inquire, with an air of triumph, as if our national perils were vanished, if I still persist in venerating the opposers of those measures which have drawn such perils upon us!!! Let my three notes of admiring marvel, answer the ques

tion.

If you like the present situation of these kingdoms better than that in which they were before this war commenced, when Britain was great among the nations, I do not. If that situation is really altered for the better, our ministry ought to be acquitted. If it is not, those who exhorted them to abandon hopeless projects to quit a falling cause, when the first pillar* of the league gave way, were the friends of their country. So I have long thought, so I shall ever think, and such will be the universal opinion in a very few more

years.

*Prussia.

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