I thank heaven, yourself, and Lady Eleanor, possess in the sense, hourly, ocular, and audible, of each other's existence, a healing balm for every wound which the resistless dart can inflict on objects of secondary dearness.

A little time will now put me in possession of the Plays on the Passions. I had rather read a new work before I purchase it; but there is no borrowing these dramas here; yet I see they have interested my charming friends of the Cambrian vale, and have therefore every confidence that they will interest me. My literary friend and correspondent, Mrs Jackson, whose taste is highly just and discriminating, also speaks of them in a style which creates considerable predilection.

After giving her reasons for preferring Count Basil to the general favourite, Count de Montford, she says: "Before their author was known, I observed so much of the power and defects of Mrs Radcliffe's compositions in these dramas, as to believe them hers; and I hear she owns them. Mrs Radcliffe, in whatever she writes, attentive solely to the end, is not sufficiently attentive to observe probability and unity of character in the meaus she uses to attain it. She bends her plan, or, if it will not bend, she breaks it to her catastrophe, instead of making the catastrophe grow out of the preceding events. Still she always

takes strong hold of her reader's feelings; and effects her purpose boldly, if not regularly. Her descriptive talent, used to satiety in her novels, is here employed with more temperance, and consequently to better purpose."

In this critique, dear Miss Ponsonby, you will perceive the strength of my excellent Mrs Jackson's understanding, and the discrimination of her judgment.

What a heterogeneous compound is the Oberon, of sportive fancy and grotesque humour! of occasional sublimity, and continually occurring vulgarness of expression and idiom! It is the wildest production of the wild German school, which so industriously seeks to lead us back to our nurseries; their ghosts, their fiends, and their fairies. The numbers in the translation want easy flow, and harmonic roundness.

Truly Jack the Piper is come to great honour to have his Tarantula means of punishment adopted, not only in Caliph Vathec, that witty rival of Voltaire's tales, but in this allegoric epic, which aspires to emulate Spencer.

In two reviews, which lately fell in my way, I saw unqualified praise lavished upon the morality of this motely Oberon.-Curious is the encomium. From its sensual voluptuousness of description, I declare I scarcely know the book I

would not sooner put into the hands of ingenuous youth. Lewis's Monk, so mercilessly abused for imputed immorality in its luxuriance, is almost an icicle in the comparison. The descriptions which are of that species in Oberon, we find more frequent, more highly coloured, more discriminate than in the Monk, or than any which can be found in Rousseau's Eloisa. Ah! with how much more justice may the censure Voltaire passed upon that novel be applied to Oberon ! "Its author is an empiric, who poisons our souls for the glory of curing them, and the poison will work violently on the passions, and the antidote will operate only on the understanding." In Oberon the outline, the poetic justice of the punishment is moral, but the interior parts abound with the most lavish fuel to refined sensuality; the only sensuality which can be dangerous to amiable young people.

It was a strange fancy to make the exordium utterly unintelligible till after we have read the whole. Instead of preparing us for the poem, the poem must prepare us for the exordium.

Surely the translator wants taste, so totally to exclude every thing like, what is called by painters, keeping in the style. Florid and elevated language, perpetually interspersed with such words and phrases as-old boozer-safe and sound

chat-spilled tears-popt out the secret-fished out the cause-noodle, &c. Then the perpetual recurrence of the word wink, is beyond measure disgusting. Why did he not, on serious occasions, substitute the word glance, which had occupied the same space in the verse? When we read of Eternal Providence accomplishing its designs in a wink, we turn from the low phrase with more than disgust. Nay, on lesser occasions, when the lovely luxurious-Almaransis winks her attendants away, the miserable word breaks, in my imagination, all the magic of her graces. endure to see old Sherasmin nodding and winking, but who, that is elegant, ever winked and blinked in the presence of him to whom she wished to appear enchanting, or even decently wellbred.

We

However, after all the childish extravagance of the plan, and all the motley infelicities of the translator's style, all the cramp of the numbers, I confess Oberon a work of very considerable genius; that it amused and interested me extremely; and that five times the sum it cost should not induce me (adopting its own language) to suffer any old boozer to carry it off, in a wink, for ever from my book-shelves; and for my young friends, "I hold it very stuff of the conscience" not even to lend it them.

I am beyond measure gratified by all which the dear letter before me says in honour of my late volume. Whatever may prove its reception from the world, and its consequent circulation, if the hireling critics should, by their censures, sink it into present neglect, I cannot therefore repent having published my Sonnets and Horatian Paraphrases, since they have obtained such warm praise from my lettered friends, and since they would not so well have escaped from press-errors beneath the eye of a posthumous editor. If I do not extremely flatter myself, the sonnets possess an inherent bouyancy, which give them the power of emerging in future. That expectation has been often ridiculed as the forlorn hope of the poet; but Spenser, Milton, Otway, Collins, and Chatterton, are instances that it is not always found vain.

Yourself and Lady Eleanor are no strangers to the new poetic star of the Caledonian sphere; but, nourishing, as I do, the pleasing hope of being enabled to pass a few days beneath your roof, in the autumn of this yet wintry year, I almost hope his last and yet unpublished poems, Glenfinlas and the Eve of St John, may not previously meet your eye; that I may have the delight of reading them to you, and observing the lively interest they will excite, and the glowing