an infinitely greater dramatic writer than Menander, Sophocles, Eschylus, or Euripides, boldly assert that truth demonstrated by the effect of his plays, that all limits, as to time or place, are not only superfluous, but inimical to the theatric representation of human life, character, and man

ners.

You say you would not vainly attempt to imitate Shakespeare. Servile imitation is disgraceful; but there is neither servility nor vanity in observing and in using the means by which great writers attain their purposes. Why should not the poet, as well as the painter, work after the best models?

I wonder to hear you expressing contempt for translations, since you are conscious that Dryden's finest poems, the ode excepted, are translations from Boccace and Chaucer; that Shakespeare did not disdain to adopt, not only the stories, but the thoughts and images which he found in the ballads and novels from whence he formed his plays; that, in his historic dramas, he took much from Plutarch and our own old historians.

Mr T. Warton has shewn us the outlines of the Paradise Lost in an Italian play; and of Comus, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, in the works of poets who preceded Milton half a century.

If these circumstances had been considered, you would not have said that little credit can arise from translations, or from working upon the crude materials of others. Oh! how much credit has resulted to his fame, who first made the Iliad an English poem of exquisite interest and beauty!— Adieu!

LETTER XXXVI.

F. N. C. MUNDY, ESQ.

Lichfield, April 30, 1799.

PERMIT me to express my very

flattered sense

of the honour conferred on my late publication by your charming sonnet*. It is truly Miltonic.

On Miss SEWARD's Sonnets, with particular allusion to her Twenty-first and Twenty-second.

CRITIC, hast thou fastidiously proclaim'd,

Misjudging from such humble verse as mine,
The lyre's lost energy, the sad decline
Of genius in this island, early nam'd

Self out of the question, had a superior muse been its object, I should admire it as poetry; yet permit me to enter my protest against the second line. It is unworthy the author of one of the most beautiful local poems in our language, not to feel the high poetic ground on which he stands. Leave to poetasters the humility which well becomes their meagre pretensions.

I have always remonstrated with Mr Hayley against that sort of self-injustice. In some verses of invitation, which he once sent to Gibbon, and afterwards injudiciously published in his Miscellany, he compares the Roman historian to the eagle, and himself to the sparrow, who would chirp his welcome to the imperial bird. Gibbon, who was perhaps little conversant with poetry, and therefore unable to perceive that Mr Hayley had, at least, an equal claim with himself to the

In classic heraldry, and foremost fam'd?

From Greece, from Latium, came th' impatient Nine,
Here to revive their laurels, and entwine

Their shoots; rewards of Envy only blam'd.-
And here they still rejoice; here still abides
Imagination in her mountains strong;

While Harmony beneath her stream divides.
And thou shalt blush, vain critic, for thy wrong

Tasting these sweets which the Queen Muse provides,
With rarest elegance of sex and song.

palm of genius, took the unjust comparison and hyperbolic compliment very coolly; and, in one of his published letters, says, respecting his visit to Eartham, "The sparrow chirped very prettily to me amid his groves." For having stooped to the false humility of self-degradation, Mr Hayley deserved the inevitable jar that sentence must give to his feelings. It was an impertinence which he had drawn upon himself.

O! bard of Needwood, remember Milton's noble self-assertion, in his eighth Sonnet-remember also that Pope calls his own writings,

"The deathless satire, the immortal song."

Surely it is one thing to be vain, and another to assert our just claims. I always enjoy hearing a man of genius telling the undervaluing blockheads, that he feels the extent of his own powers:

"To see him weigh them with himself, Then value;-oft-times nothing profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right."

Suffer me to apply to you, on the subject of disavowed genius, the following lines, which were subjoined to a gratifying epigram on my Hora

tian Paraphrases, by our learned and venerable Canon, Mr Inge of this place.

"Sume superbiam

Quæsitam meritis; et mihi Delphica
Lauro cinge volens, Melpomene comam."

I see you make Imagination masculine. To be sure the partial distribution of its gifts to the male sex, might induce us to suppose it of the brotherhood; but I have always seen genius manified, and imagination, or fancy, womanized. I hope you pardon word coining. Indeed, according to Richardson, it should be female, on the very account of that partial distribution. His Lovelace, in the Clarissa, says,-" Women make better monarchs than men," glancing at the superiority of Elizabeth's government to that of the five kings who preceded her from our fifth Henry, and to that of her four Stuart successors; also at the more temperate, wiser, and happier reign of Anne, compared to the sway of her four ancestors. For the superiority he thus accounts: "It is from the power each sex possesses over the mind of the other, that a nation has best chance for happiness under a queen, since then they are governed by men, while under kings they are governed by women."