ページの画像
PDF
ePub

From a

praise with which they will be honoured. It is my great happiness to be exempt from the frequent torment of authors, literary envy, though perhaps there is little virtue in exemption so constitutional; but it renders my poetic pleasures wholly unembittered from that source. very different one they are often allayed, since I cannot read or hear the beautiful compositions, bold, original, and sublime, which have poured in upon this torpid age, from such various authors, insolently criticized, and unjustly depreciated, without feelings of very painful indignation.

Our little city, in its late contested election, has had a taste of the diabolic mischiefs of awakened strife. It assailed reputation by anonymous libels, and it produced riots which hazarded complicated murders. Though I took no active interest, and, neither by tongue or pen, said one bitter word against any of the party opposite to that which had my calm good wishes, yet, because a certain vilely abusive song upon one of its agents was tolerably written, it was imputed to me. I would as soon have robbed or killed the person it libelled, as have written or encouraged the publication of those verses. I never saw nor heard of them till they had been several days printed, and when they

were read to me, expressed the sincerest indignation against the composition and its unknown author; yet the improbable suspicion produced a most injurious effort of dark-spirited malice and revenge. There can be no doubt the contriver would have murdered me if he durst for the laws. Instances of such industrious villainy, the bitter fruits of a contention, in which personal spite and fury is at once wickedness and idiotism, should teach us the injustice of national reflections ;— should shake to air our proud vaunt that Englishmen would, amid the flames of civil war, be less. cruel than Frenchmen, or than the Irish.

I am tempted to insert a little impromptu of mine, which arose from my having observed, that Pope had ill-defined the subtle essence of wit in the following couplet :

"True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;"

since new ideas, or rather new combinations of ideas, are vital to its existence. His dogma applies better to eloquence. This is my attempt on the subject:

"Wit springs from images in contact brought,
Till then ne'er coupled, or in fact, or thought;

Yet, seen together, people laugh and wonder,
How things so like, so long were kept asunder."

I have the honour to remain, &c.

LETTER XXXIX.

JOSEPH SYKES, Esq. of West-Ella, Yorkshire. Lichfield, May 28, 1799.

I JOY to perceive, in the kind letter before me, those free and steady characters, which bespeak an unfailing frame; those sensibilities which seventyeight years have nothing chilled, and an animated clearness of style demonstrating that the intellectual torch wavers not, neither dims in its earthly socket. It was impossible to hope that you should not have irksomely felt the rigours of our late Siberian winter, and its long long reign. Our spring, which has deserted her season, and withheld her hours of promise, deserves equal reproach with that of 1783, which my fifty-fifth sonnet upbraids for the same crime. It glads me that the centennial group have interested so warmly my oldest friend now existing; the pater

nal friend of my youth. The sonnet is an order of verse, favourable above most others to the effusions of the heart. It enables the poet to arrest fleeting impressions, and to preserve them in their first vivid glow; impressions which else would probably vanish, or if laid by for future use in the memory, would grow faint and cold in the comparison, ere they could be enwoven with other matter, and in a longer work.

de

Your fidelity to your Horatian promise*, lights me almost as much in the contemplation, as those successful efforts of grateful zeal, which procured ease and affluence to a learned and worthy man.

Repeatedly, since I received your last letter, have I imagined the mutual happiness of that interview, when unexpectedly calling upon you some years after you were established as a British merchant, he found you in the act of performing your votive classic duty. Nor know I which most to admire, the master who enjoined the task,

* The ingenious preceptor of this excellent man's schooldays enjoined him, on their separation, to promise that he would read an ode of Horace every day, during the ensuing twenty years. Mr Sykes of West-Elia, is second son to a Sir Christopher Sykes, ancestor to the present Sir Christopher. He has been a prosperous and liberal merchant, beloved and respected by his large family, and by all who knew him.-S.

which was to preserve your literary acquirements, and poetic taste, or the fidelity of the pupil, who suffered not the pressing claims of an extensive commerce to impede its performance.

Sir B. Boothby sent me, in manuscript, the elegy on your late illustrious friend, Mr Mason, which you kindly offer to transmit. I liked it very much; but I did not like Dr Darwin's epitaph upon him. It is, or, at least when I saw it, it was without simplicity, pathos, or piety; fine picture, and only fine picture. Dr Darwin's principles incapacitate him for writing epitaphs as they ought to be written. That on Mrs French, in the Botanic Garden, is yet more exceptionable. It talks of Beauty pleading at the throne of God, -as if the Maker of the universe had partialities to female charms, like those imputed to the fabled Jupiter.

Adieu my dear paternal friend-may your life be lengthened to the last possibility of its comfort,

"Whose peaceful day benevolence endears,
Whose night congratulating conscience clears."

« 前へ次へ »