LETTER LXIII.

MR H. CARY, of Christ College.

March 9, 1793.

I MUST, dear Cary, consider your pleaded inability to make a good local poem out of the Rosamondian superstitions yet prevailing at Godstow, as a mere excuse of indolence. Want of leisure is another affair; and if your time is employed to better purposes of future fame, or prosperity, my friendship should repress the wish of my imagina

tion.

I do not controvert the fact, that poets are too seldom to be trusted concerning the value of each other's compositions; but you and I differed as to the causes which rendered them, I will not say incompetent, but unfair judges. The heart! the heart! my dear Cary; if that was right,-did no unworthy jealousy, no mean selfish desire of confining excellence to that line of writing in which themselves excel, lurk there," to twist opinions in contempt of justice," the prose-men's sensibility of beauty, and perceptions of defect, could

stand on no ground of competition with that of the bards.

Darwin is a great system-monger, and has certainly taken up an erroneous one concerning the constituent essentials of fine poetry, since he asserts that every thing is prose which is not picture ;—a system which has destroyed his taste for simplicity, and induced him to be much too profuse of ornament. Yet surely you say wonderfully too little for his highly ingenious poem, in telling me, that you admire his "little pictures, tied together with festoons of ribbands," as, in his preface, with affected modesty, he calls that splendid gallery, where we often find the strength and force of Michael Angelo, as well as the softness of Raphael, and the tints of Titian,

Mr Hayley, after whose employments you inquire, has been lately engaged in writing the life of Milton. Not having heard from him since the execrable French completed the measure of their bloody tyrannies by the murder of the most mild and merciful monarch they ever had, I should not wonder if he withholds his work from the public eye at present. I suspect and fear that his bias towards democratic principles appear too strongly in that work, not to expose it to an ungracious reception, now that generous indignation is almost universally, would to God it were

wholly prevalent, against the guilt and misery they have produced in France.

You justly deplore the present apathy of public taste to Mr Hayley's just claims; yet I think a little mistake concerning the nature and bias of his own talents, has co-operated with that coldness to destroy the ardour with which his poetic efforts were once received. It appears to me that Mr Hayley's genius is of the same class with that of Pope. Pope did not attempt tragedy; and, had he attempted it, would not probably have produced dramatic compositions of equal merit with his other poems. So it proved with the dear bard in his Lord Russell and Marcella. The sentiments of the first are pleasing, natural, and pathetic, but the style wants spirit and variety. The second is so disgusting in its plot, that it was never likely to please. If any of the critical friends he consulted flattered him on the subject of those tragedies, they injured him. I was not of the number, and contented myself with reserving my ingenious praise for his charming comedies in rhyme, which, though they may not do well in representation, are, in the closet, as brilliant as they are original. Unwarned by the unpopularity of Lord Russell and Marcella, he wrote another tragedy, and pushed its fate on the stage. You know the event. A disgraced play is one of

the most fatal blights the respectability of a living author, in the eyes of the multitude, can receive; but future ages will either not know the circumstance, or, knowing, disregard it. You say the Triumphs of Temper ensure immortality to Mr Hayley's fame; but surely, if that exquisite sportive production of a rich and luxuriant imagination had never been written, his beautiful Epistles on Painting, and, far above even them, his Essays on Epic Poetry, together with that fine Ode to Howard, will be considered as amongst the first Delphic ornaments of the eighteenth century. Apropos of odes, I am delighted with the Abori ginal Odes. In my estimation, the light of genius shines with tenfold force in them, compared to the author's first poem in couplets, the Abori ginal Britons-though that will, I am sensible, much more generally please. Lyric composition, of genuine excellence, is not only out of the sphere of the common reader, but even of those who may be interested and pleased with a pleasing poem in ten or eight feet verse, or in the elegiac stanza, or in the lighter quatrain-but sublime odes are, even to such, like those stars—

"That, plac'd beyond a certain height,
Give mortals neither heat nor light."

The multitude, however, may, in time, be talked into applauding lyric excellence, when the suffrages of men of genius, liberal enough warmly to celebrate what they feel deserves celebration, shall accumulate, and form a mass of fame, to which the variety of superficial readers, and of those of bounded taste, will induce them to add, rather than, by fruitlessly attempting to diminish it, disgrace themselves. Such, at least, was the inevitable destiny of fine odes; such it will again unquestionably be, if the idle sneers of Johnson, on that line of poetry, shall fall into the contempt they deserve; but if they continue to be generally thought oracular, in vain, for his future glory, shall the bard strike the lyre of Pindar and of Gray, with congenial happiness.-With congenial happiness, surely, has Mr Richards struck it, especially in the second ode, the Captivity of Caractacus. The first has fine passages; but resembling, somewhat too nearly, the Alexander's Feast, and the Welch Bard, it has less originality than its younger brother.

This is a long letter from such an invalid as myself. I have been much out of health lately, and have reason, I think, to apprehend that the vital props are giving way! Adieu!