"Nor yet, nor man, nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks

Invisible, except to God alone,

By his permissive will, through heaven and earth.
And oft, though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity

Resigns her charge.”

That it for once beguiled the clearest sighted of of all our politicians is certain; but if that single instance of dupism can unfit a man, or set of men, for the service of the state, how totally must the so far out-numbering instances in which Mr Pitt has been duped, in the face of all Europe, disqualify him for retaining the reasonable confidence of the people of England!

Adieu! and believe, what is most true, that it is not in the wide difference of our opinion concerning those measures which may best preserve the weal of this country, to alienate from you any portion of my esteem and regard.

LETTER XXVIII.

MISS PONSONBY.

Lichfield, Nov. 15, 1798.

MOST sincerely, dearest Madam, do I sympathize with your and Lady Eleanor's anxieties and sorrows, of triple source, patriotism, consanguinity, and friendship. Ah! wretched Ireland, how dire is the insecurity of thy inhabitants! In other civil wars, barbarities as dreadful have been committed;-witness that in the Duke of Ormond's time, of which Phelim O'Neale was the Holt ;but when the contest became hopeless, the sanguinary thirst ceased. Now a fiend-like fury prevails-murder for the sake of murder, sparing neither sex, infancy, or age, nor even waiting for the spur of personal revenge.

I see, with the deepest concern, and the most desponding fears for the result, the success of this country's renewed incendiarisms on the continent. Ah, Heaven! is it thus the English nation shews its gratitude to thee for the signal, the glorious victories, with which thou hast blest our fleets! How much more worthy a wise, a humane, a

1

Christian nation, instead of goading on the emperor to set the existence of the German empire on one desperate cast, to have said to France,"Let the exterminating sword be sheathed. Meet us with reasonable terms of reconcilement, and we will find our noblest pride in shewing you, and the whole world, that our naval victories have not shut our hearts to compassion for the miseries our continued warfare must produce to both nations."

I now hasten to obey your injunction, and speak my sentiments of the poetical merits and defects of that exquisite picture of a transcript, "The Little Grey Man," which you have taken the kind trouble to trace. It has some few pleasing, and some few fine images; but there is so much of ludicrous about the Little Grey Man himself, that I confess I am more inclined to laugh than to shudder at him. Then the course of the tale is so distorted from nature and probability; is so totally void of sentiment or moral, as to induce my belief that it is the poem of which I heard at Buxton, said to be written by Mr Bunbury, in ridicule of the German stories, and the prevailing taste for supernatural horrors. Considered in this light, it is more acceptable to my taste, than if I thought its author in earnest to vie with the terrible graces of Alonzo and Imogen, or of, in

Spencer's translation, the far sublimer Leonora. In those poems, the perjured inconstancy of one heroine, and the blasphemous despair of the other, are justly punished.

Surely, in the protection of her father's house, and amid groups of human beings, Mary Jeane must naturally think she could better have defended herself from the renewed visits of the hideous tenant of the grave, than alone on the wild hills of St Bertrand, amid the tangled woods of Limeburgh, and on the Golgotha of Sombremond*. Is that name, so adapted to the scene, real?

Though I cannot think the author of this wild work serious, yet the subject seems to have irresistibly led him to exhibit, among his mock-terrifics, some pictures that have the genuine grandeur of horror, and some natural touches of simple beauty. The style, in general, is so meagre, that, if he can be thought in earnest, we must believe him, with many other versifiers, mistaking silliness for simplicity.

* In the prelude to this strange poem, it is asserted, that, on certain plains on the high-roads in Germany, the bodies of malefactors are exposed on wheels and gibbets; and that pilgrim travellers often pass the night amid those dire groups, to secure themselves from the living banditti that, infesting the highways, will yet not approach the mangled carcasses of their associates.-S.

I discern no fine features of either style till the twelfth stanza; and there only in the third and fourth lines. I like the thirteenth extremely. In that, the pilgrim, looking back on the cheerful lights of the town, is natural and pleasing picture. The fourteenth finely describes the dreary journey; the fifteenth, as finely, the horrors of the plain of Sombremond; the sixteenth has nothing striking; the seventeenth is striking; the eighteenth grander still its picture of the raven is the gem of the composition; and as it is new as to position and action, so is it sublime :

"And he croak'd round the wheel as he heavily flew."

The vultures of the next couplet are commonplace, in comparison; aiming to be more, they are poetically much less impressive.

The fourth line of the nineteenth stanza is also

grandly horrid; but the Little Grey Man on the field of battle, is again too ludicrous to be dreadful; and a twenty-three days walk for a man deeply wounded, outrages, not only the probable, but the possible. The real-life events ought to be natural, even where the machinery is supernatural.

The nine ensuing stanzas, till the last line of the twenty-eighth, might have been written by any common versifier :—