without servile imitation, was to venture, as Jephson did venture, to take Shakespeare's style for his model, would be booted, as Jephson was hooted, from public credit and just admiration, by the public critics.

Were it possible to produce such plays now as Cymbeline, the Tempest, or As You Like It, what chance would they have of applause from the reviewers, of endurance from a modern audience?—and yet, strange paradox! while a writer is not allowed to assume Shakespeare's daring privileges of style, his mixture of great and mean characters, such as human life produces, and which, therefore, the dramatist should copy;his mixture of grand and familiar language, his bold and perpetual use of metaphor; his custom of making adjectives into verbs, &c., the modern play is always brought into comparison with Shakespeare's by the reviewers, for the purpose of disgracing it.

I have always perceived this withering injustice, and have therefore never attempted to write a tragedy.

You have, doubtless, observed that Providence, wise, and, on the whole, equal in its gifts to the general mind, supplies in number what it may withhold in degree, as to genius, in most sciences. The poetic writers, contemporary with Spencer,

Shakespeare, and Milton, were not only few in number, but those few as much inferior to the poets of this century, Dryden perhaps excepted, as its best poets are inferior to Shakespeare and Milton. How much greater, as lyric poets, are Collins, Gray, Mason, the boy Chatterton, Hayley, and Coleridge, than Cowley; how much greater, as an epic poet, is young Southey to the maturer Davenant; as satirists, Pope, Dr Johnson, and Cowper, compared to Donne; in pastoral, Shenstone and Burns, than Gay and Philips; the four last, indeed, though not contemporaries, were of the same century.

In philosophy, if we have not a Newton, who else of his day equalled Priestley, Darwin, and Herschel, in natural and scientific discoveries? In her former historians, England finds none so justly her boast as Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon; nor amongst her serious essayists, strength and eloquence, that equal Aikin, Barbauld, and Johnson.

Lo! into what length has my zeal for the just claims of my country in the undiminished genius of her sons, led me! but I think I have been guided by no ignis-fatuus. Adieu!

LETTER XXXI.

Miss PONSONBY.

Lichfield, Jan. 24, 1799.

I HAVE to thank you, dearest ladies, for a very beautiful but too costly present. This ring and seal in one, this Apollo's head and lyre, makes an admirable impression. It is a fine gem, and rich and elegant is the circlet for the finger. As your gift, it possesses value,

-"Gold says,' is not in me;' And, not in me,' the diamond."

Mr S. desires me to make his grateful acknowledgment for the elegant testimony he has received of Lady E. Butler and Miss Ponsonby's regard, who increase the happiness of all on whom they smile, and confer distinction wherever they

esteem.

Frequent are the periods in which I grieve for the lost tranquillity of your hearts, and in which I deplore the cause. This forcing the scheme of union upon Ireland, against the general inclina

tion of its people, especially at this dangerous juncture, is a new instance of the daring pride of Mr Pitt. The English may thank themselves for the complicated mischiefs he has brought upon their country. They have not only borne and do bear, but have applauded, and yet applaud, his baffled schemes, and heavy unprecedented oppressions, till they have taught him to think he may coerce the world. He commands a majority in the Irish parliament, and he will say to the sword, Do thou the rest.

When last I had the honour to address you, it was with the fervent and probable hope, that, ere this time, I should have the happiness to congratulate you on the restored tranquillity of your native country; it was then comfortably in train for that blessed event, till this fatal scheme came forward:

"That bears a thousand dangers on its wing,
And thousand well-disposed Irish hearts
Plucks from the cause of England.” ·

My sonnets and odes are gone to press. I wished a pretty engraving for their frontispiece. A design occurred to me, allusive to the first sonnet. I described it to our Lichfield Claude, Glover, and though landscape, not figures, is his study, he has made a sweet drawing from my plan,

if the engraver will but do him equal justice. Imagination, a beautiful female figure, stands lightly on an eminence, partially gilded by a sunbeam, glancing through the clouds of a gloomy horizon, which darken the surrounding scene below. With her hands gracefully lifted, she holds her lamp up to the sunbeam, which enkindles it. The motto you will find underdrawn in the lines which suggested my design:

"Lo! with alter'd brows

Lowers the false world, and the fine spirit grieves,
No more Hope's day-spring tints with light and bloom
The darkening scene. Then to ourselves we say,
Come, bright Imagination come, relume
Thy orient lamp!”

Glover is a man of most comprehensive genius. His first attempt at portrait, and he has yet made only two, is a striking and pleasing likeness of our young and lovely Mr Lister, whose literary fame is rising fast, and I conceive his talents plumed for a very lofty flight; but I have not yet dismissed Mr Glover, whose taste is not less awakened to the beauties of the pen, than his hand is competent to the powers of the pencil. A gentle and amiable temper has removed from his voice, and from his manners, every vestige of that rusticity