since, in her admired northern tour, she acknowledges herself a mother by Imlay, to whom she could not have been a legal wife, as he was known to be living when she married Godwin.

To reveal the motives on which she had acted; -to paint the strength of her basely betrayed attachment to that villain Imlay, was surely not injury but justice to the memory of a deceased wife.

I have but one fault to find with these Memoirs. It is, however, a great one-the needless display of his own infidelity as to revealed religion, and his seeking to involve her in the scepticism by implication, not by proof, since he allows she was habitually and fervently devout. Why then should he expose her to the censure of irreligion from the mass of mankind, who imagine God can be worshipped effectually in no way but their own?

I must not say farewell, without inquiring after the Muse of Landscape, and expressing my hope that the number of votaries who seek her shrine, and you, her high-priest, does not abate at the grin of those monsters in finance, the assessed

taxes.

LETTER XII.

THE RIGHT HON. LADY ELEANOR BUTLER, AND MISS PONSONBY.

Lichfield, April 24, 1798.

THE frame for Honora's exact, though accidental, resemblance in the print of Romney's Serena reading by candle light, is at length arrived. I dare believe my charming friends will think the figure, countenance, and features, express the sweetness, intelligence, and grace, with which the strains, honoured by their mu' tual partiality, invest the fair friend of my youth.

You must each have been deeply disquieted by the miserable scenes which have been acted in your native Ireland since I had last the honour to address you. None of your particular friends are, I trust, on the dire list of those who have fallen the victims of its assassinations. Had my gallant friend, the murdered Colonel St George, the happiness of your acquaintance?— Of him at least you must well know, from your

intimacy with his lovely and accomplished sisterin-law.

I

My Telemachus has taken a snail's walk since

gave myself the pleasure of writing to you. Two mornings of leisure, the only ones I could obtain in the interim, produced the inclosed extract. You have heard me say, that I could scarcely ever persuade myself to admit the muses, in exclusion of any social or epistolary duty or pleasure. Small, therefore, with connections and correspondence so numerous, is the probability that I shall ever finish an epic poem.

You will perceive that Fenelon's Telemachus forms as yet but the mere basis of this attempted work; but I conclude, that when the prince, in what will form my third book, narrates his own adventures, I must be more indebted to the prose composition. Whether those incidents, not very interesting from Fenelon's pen, are capable of receiving poetic spirit and animation from mine, remains to be tried. If I retain my excursive manner of going over the ground, there will be sufficient length for an epic poem, without pursuing the long train of less animated events that ensues after Telemachus and Mentor quit Calypso's island. Homer follows not Achilles when he leaves the ruins of Troy; and if Virgil had

not followed Æneas after he left Carthage, his poem, though less complete, would have been more interesting. After the death of Dido I yawned through the remainder; read it once as a task, and never since looked into the pages beyond that epoch.

Ah! dearest ladies, how groundless has the assertion proved on which every one relied, that Duncan's victory threw the perils of invasion at a wide distance !—but I will not pursue the alarming subject.

This day a summer's sun warmly gilds the fields, the gardens, and the groves, now diffusing fragrance, and bursting into bloom. Fresh and undulating breezes from the east lured me into my drawing-room, having placed in its lifted sash the Æolian harp. It is, at this instant, warbling through all the varieties of the harmonic chords. This apartment looks upon a small lawn, gently sloping upwards. Till this spring, it was shrubbery to the edge of the grassy terrace on its summit; but I have lately covered it with a fine turf, sprinkled with cypresses, junipers, and laurels. It is bordered on the right hand by tall laburnums, lilachs, and trees of the Gelder rose,

"throwing up, mid trees of darker leaf,

Its silver globes, light as the foamy surf,

Which the wind severs from the broken wave."

Beyond this little lawny elevation, the wall which divides its terrace from the sweet valley it overlooks, is not visible. These windows command the loveliest part of that valley, and only its first field is concealed by the sloping swell of the foreground. The vale is scarcely half a mile across, bounded, basin-like, by a semicircle of gentle hills, luxuriantly foliaged. There is a lake in its bosom, and a venerable old church, with its grey and moss-grown tower on the water's edge. Left of that old church, on the rising ground beyond, stands an elegant villa, half shrouded in its groves; -and, to the right below, on the bank of the lake, another villa with its gardens. The as yet azure waters are but little intercepted by the immense and very ancient willow that stands opposite these windows in the middle of the vale; that willow, whose height and dimensions are the wonder of naturalists. The centre of the lake gleams through its wide-spread branches, and it appears on each side like a considerable river, from its boundaries being concealed. On the right, one of our streets runs from the town to the water, interspersed with