and amidst every opposition, she should imp her eagle wings. Life is busy, eventful, and manycoloured the stage should be the world's epitome. : LETTER XXXIV. MISS PONSONBY. Lichfield, April 3, 1799. THAT your and Lady Eleanor's kind attentive cares have restored the health of your humble friend and follower of your fortunes, I congratulate you, my dearest Madam*. Concerning your own and mutual health, the kind letter, which I have now the honour to acknowledge, makes no mention. I therefore flatter myself it is unimpaired. *The female servant who, when these ladies left their splendid connections in Ireland, twenty years ago, to seek a lettered retirement in Wales, pined a few months for their absence, and then set out to search for them in England, without any clue to direct her pursnit, since, to avoid solicitations to return, they had kept the scene of their retreat a secret even from their nearest relations and friends.-S. Would to Heaven I could entertain for your peace as dear a certainty * !—but let me forbear to touch the jarring string, which you shun to vibrate;— nor will I descant on my own increasing weakness from the augmenting tyranny of rheumatic dis ease. Correcting every proof-sheet of my emerging volume, has been a task at once engrossing and irksome. Yet was it not repented even in the most oppressive moments of lassitude. The proper or improper position even of commas and semicolons, is momentous to perspicuity. We cannot hope from the demons of the press a sedulous attention to them, and revisers are very prone to conceive a meaning in passages foreign from the author's conception, and hence to alter the punctuation so as to favour their own mistaken idea. There is no guarding against that danger, but by the author correcting the press himself. It is true his eye, conscious of what should be, is apt to overlook what is. This propensity has probably left several erroneous verbalisms in myself-revised sheets; but worse mischief had probably ensued from delegating that trust, even though the person so employed were a man of sense, and a scholar. * On account of the present dreadful situation of their native Ireland.-S. The desire which you say your numerous correspondents express to see my muse re-entered on the paths of publicity, is highly flattering, thorny as those paths are apt to prove. Considering that desire as sincere, it gratifies my hope of her welcome reception in the world; and, in the modester idea, that such avowed impatience is merely the wish of saying what they know will please those whom every person of taste desires to please, their courtierism must result from a belief thrice precious to my heart;-and thus, either way, am I gratified. A friend of Mr Roscoe's lately sent me that gentleman's translation, in verse, of an ancient Italian poem, La Balia*, by Tansillio. By making immense boasts, in the preface, of the poetic merit of his original, Mr Roscoe made himself responsible for a very charming poem in an English dress. Either he has been fascinated by the grandeur and sweetness of the Italian language, into a very overweening appreciation of the merit of La Balia, or he has suffered the charms and graces, of which he boasts, to vanish from beneath his pen in their translation. It is, in truth, a drynurse in his versification, destitute of imagery, barren of metaphor, and nearly naked as to allu The Nurse.-S. sion. In short, we find scarce any of the poetic essentials in this work; the versification is flat and monotonous; nor does the long and heavy composition contain, in my opinion, twenty lines which deserve to be called poetry. Many passages are obscure through grammatic inaccuracy. The duty enjoined by this poem is, without doubt, important, and, in the higher classes of life, infamously sacrificed to unjustifiable excuses; -but, by ridiculous exaggeration of the evils resulting from its neglect, the poet disarms the force of his own admonitions. The unnatural practice of omitting it through idleness, the love of amusement, or personal vanity, is sufficiently reprehensible, without calling in the aid of bugbear. The injunctions to perform it are, in this composition, positive, without making any exceptions from circumstances which render a large number of mothers unfit for this delightful office, as insanity or scrofula in their families, or a pulmonary or scorbutic taint in their own constitution. Also, with no more exceptions, it pronounces the hired wet-nurse an inevitable fiend, whether in or out of the house of her employer; and absurdly asserts that, not only bodily diseases are imbibed by the infant from her, but every grovelling and vicious propensity, as if ignorance and wickedness could be conveyed by aliment. Where the maternal nutriment is ineligible, no mention is made of cow's milk as a substitute. Experience continually proves that a healthy infant may be so fed, without danger of inoculated malady. With all the sins of omission against poetry, and all of commission against good sense, with which this translation abounds, I observed to Mr Saville and cousin White, when we read it together, that the reviewers would applaud it. They exclaimed," Impossible! you are too hard upon reviewers." But, lo! my prophecy is accomplished. I knew that the celebrity which Lorenzo de Medicis has obtained, would make them conclude every production must be good which came from the pen of its author. I believed they were not aware that it is one thing to be a good prosewriter, an industrious linguist, and historian, and even a good classic scholar, and another to be a good poet. From specimens, which I had seen in former years, of Mr Roscoe's verse-writing, the defects of this translation were no great surprise to me. His powers, in that art, are not above mediocrity;-but the suffrages of the reviewers will give this poem present sale; and then, like Glover's Leonidas, it will sink to rise The prefixed sonnet to Mrs Roscoe is pretty-worth more, short as it is, than the old no more. |