The noon-day scenery is admirably expanded in the last edition. The hay-harvest and the sheep-shearing are all new matter, and given with the precision of exactest observation, and with the picturesque powers of genius.

The episodes are all dear to me, but I do not like the frequency of complimentary addresses to the actual persons of the author's day, and they are multiplied in the last edition. Good nature will, however, pardon them, as tributes of esteem or gratitude, and from their tendency to promote the sale of the work; but they ruefully encumber the poetry.

The alterations in the passage, from line 555, have, I think, flattened" the race and flavour" which we perceive in the former reading. As to the description of the waterfall in the next passage, I hardly know which to prefer, the first or last fabrication.

Now appear the grand additions, produced by the scenery of the torrid climes. Johnson could not have cast the slightest glance upon them without perceiving their infinitely enhancing valuebut it is likely he never saw them. If he had neither been prejudiced nor envious, his arrogant idleness outweighed the consideration of his talents in the scales of fitness, or unfitness for a critic, who was to decide upon the moral and intellectual

claims of preceding genius. He had not patience to examine and compare; yet, on all subjects, had the temerity to decide, without scruple, against the opinion of persons of great ability, who had examined and compared. I believe he seldom looked into the poetry he was criticizing, but pronounced judgment from the recollection of his juvenile impressions. If, in his later days, he opened the final edition of the Seasons, and met with a line or two which he liked better in the first copy, it would have been very like him to dash the book away, and, without farther examination, to conclude, that all the poet changed he had changed for the worse.

The thunder-storm is brought much forwarder in the poem, and, by little touches, improved ; but the strikingly natural and fine picture of the shepherd, killed under a rock by the lightning, with his half-stunned dog at his feet, is struck out, and surely it is a great loss. The author probably thought it lessened the effect of the soon-succeeding story of Celadon and his Amelia-but the pictures, so different, though on the same subject, surely he judged ill to eraze the first. Then the moral reflections on the appalling scene, extending originally through twenty-four lines, are condensed into one; and who would not be sorry to lose such lines as these descriptive of the

man of malice, and of blood, beneath a pealing horizon:

"He thinks the tempest weaves* around his head,
Loudens the roar to him, and in his eye

The bluest vengeance glares."

And the solitary atheist, attempting to pray, but unable, is also unhappily erazed.

I do not so much regret the banished passage which, in the first edition, succeeds to the story of Celadon and Amelia. It has obscurities of expression, and the picture has not Thomson's usual distinctness.

The horizon and landscape, shining out after the storm, is painted with double beauty and precision in the last edition; and what a gem is the added episode of Musidora bathing! The augmentation of the list of British heroes, sages, and patriots, must be welcome to every mind attached to its country, and admiring virtue.

The fine compliment to Scotland, and its inhabitants, with the simile of the Aurora Borealis for their talents, and the description of the ignis-fatuus, and the friendly meteor, and of the northern

* Weaves, a very bold but very fine word in that place--the loom of vengeance.-S.

lights, are all transferred from Summer, where they appeared in the first edition, to Autumn in the last, and are there seen with expanded power, and heightened grace; and in Summer we have the comet in their room.

Here end the material alterations in this splendid poetic Season. The final passages, in all the Seasons, remain as they were originally written-so also the opening ones, except the two first lines in the exordium of Summer, which are beautifully altered—and one word only in that to Winter, "red evening sky," is well changed to "grim evening sky."

And thus, loving the employment, have I been fond to evince how sedulously I have pursued the task of comparison, which your letters suggested. That which has been my pleasure, was Johnson's duty as the literary biographer of the great poet of nature. In a few posts, Ι purpose to send you the result of my scrutiny through the

two remaining Seasons,-and remain, &c.

LETTER XIV.

THOS. PARK, Esq.

Lichfield, May 19, 1798.

I RESUME, with alacrity, the agreeable theme of my last letter. And now, in the poem Autumn, instead of the strengthened fancy of the bard expanding his descriptions, and exploring a wider range of country, to add new scenery in his finished edition of Summer, we perceive here his matured judgment removing, with happy chisel, the incrustations of obscurity, and brilliantly polishing, by little touches, as it passes through the first 500 lines. In one of them we find the broad epithet gaudy given to Spring in both editions. It would have applied better to Summer-but, perhaps, he took it from Dryden; yet its sense in that author, where he applies it to Spring, being less direct,-metaphoric, not literal,-is more defensible; he says, "The spring of life, the bloom of gaudy years."

In the charming paraphrase of the Scripture story, Boaz and Ruth, for two half lines which had introduced city dames, who had no business