never had any spare money in my pocket; and the public exhibitions of them in London had hardly taken place when I left it. My cousin, who is with us, saw the gentleman whose pieces you mention, on the top of a scaffold, copying a famous picture in the Vatican. She has seen some of his performances, and much admires them.

You have had a great loss, and a loss that admits of no consolation, except such as will naturally suggest itself to you; such, I mean, as the scripture furnishes. We must all leave, or be left; and it is the circumstance of all others that makes long life the least desirable, that others go while we stay, till at last we find ourselves alone, like a tree on a hill-top.

Accept, my dear Madam, mine and Mrs. Unwin's best compliments to yourself and

Mr. King, and believe me, however unfre

quent in telling you that I am so,

Affectionately yours,

W. C.

TO JOSEPH HILL, ESQ.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

August 12, 1789.

I rejoice that you and Mrs. Hill are so agreeably occupied in your retreat. August, I hope, will make us amends for the gloom of its many wintry predecessors. We are now gathering from our meadows, not hay, but muck; such stuff as deserves not the carriage, which yet it must have, that the after-crop may have leave to grow. The Ouse has hardly deigned to run in his channel since the summer began.

My muse were a vixen, if she were not always ready to fly in obedience to your com

mands. But what can be done? I can write nothing in the few hours that remain to me of this day, that will be fit for your purpose; and, unless I could dispatch what I write by to-morrow's post, it would not reach you in time. I must add, too, that my friend the vicar of the next parish engaged me, the day before yesterday, to furnish him by next Sunday with a hymn, to be sung on the occasion of his preaching to the children of the Sunday-schoolt: of which hymn I have not yet produced a syllable. I am somewhat in the case of lawyer Dowling, in Tom Jones; and could I split myself into as many poets as there are Muses, could find employment for them all.

Adieu, my dear friend,

I am ever yours,

W. C.

* Olney.

†“Hear, Lord, the song of praise and pray'r," &c.

Vide Poems, vol. 3. page 138.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Aug. 16, 1789.

Mrs. Newton and you are both kind and just in believing that I do not love you less when I am long silent. Perhaps a friend of mine, who wishes me to have him always in my thoughts, is never so effectually possessed of the accomplishment of that wish, as when I have been long his debtor; for then I think of him not only every day, but day and night, and all day long. But I confess at the same time, that my thoughts of you will be more pleasant to myself when I shall have exonerated my conscience by giving you the letter so long your due. Therefore, here it comes;--little worth your having; but payment, such as it is, that you have a right to expect, and that is essential to my own tranquillity.

That the Iliad and the Odyssey should have proved the occasion of my suspending my correspondence with you, is a proof how little we foresee the consequences of what we publish. Homer, I dare say, hardly at all suspected that at the fag-end of time two personages would appear, the one ycleped Sir Newton, and the other Sir Cowper, who, loving each other heartily, would nevertheless suffer the pains of an interrupted intercourse, his poems the cause. So, however, it has happened; and though it would not, I suppose, extort from the old bard a single sigh, if he knew it, yet to me it suggests the serious reflection above-mentioned. An author by profession had need narrowly to watch his pen, lest a line should escape it which by possibility may do mischief, when he has been long dead and buried. What we have done, when we have written a book, will never be known till the day of judgment: then the account will be liquidated, and all the good