of that fame which true genius is destined to acquire.

I received Miss Bannerman's volume when Mr Nares was here, and asked him if he had seen it? "No:"-Had heard of it?"No." I asked him if he chose to see it. "No," he replied; "it will be reviewed in our work by one of my coadjutors." Meantime, before he leaves Lichfield, or had seen a syllable of it, it is reviewed in the British Critic. The circumstance confirms my former belief, that Mr Nares himself has nothing to do with the strictures in the poetic censorship of that publication. Without much confidence in his critical powers, I yet hold him superior to the nonsense of every stricture on English verse which I have seen in the British Critic. To be sure that has been only three or four of the numbers, sufficiently sickened by them of the Gildon Mr Nares employs to decide on the claims of the British poets. I repeated to Mr Nares the passage from Miss B., about a syren-song being soft as the cry of an expiring mariner. He laughed very heartily, and exclaimed, What nonsense! I think he will be a little ashamed of his coadjutor's puffs of that lady, though, in policy, he will not confess the sensation. When he comes again, I shall rally and dose him well from the Genii. I have no doubt that you will soon be aware that you have

been spell-bound upon the subject, as was Mrs Piozzi about the fustian of her friend, Merry, and the rest of the Della Cruscan school.

At length the tales of wonder are before the public, and contain Scott's Glenfinlas, and the Eve of St John, which I mentioned to you with such warm applause; but I blush for the editor respecting his dishonest imposition on the public. Two volumes, of guinea-price, one of them stuffed with old things from Dryden, Mallet, Parnel, and Percy's volumes of ancient poetry, Hosier's Ghost, &c.—and, of the few which have not already repeatedly passed the press, very few, indeed, except the beautiful Cloud-King, and the humorous ones, can rank high as poetry. tomb of Angantyr, as he calls it, is a miserable business. He must be a supreme coxcomb on that single testimony; but Scott's ballads are

gems.

His

You say you fear, from the style of his Epistles on Oratory, and that egotism of melancholy, which so often occurs on their progress, that Mr Hayley is likely to become, like Cowper, the victim of morbid despondency. His sensibilities have certainly sustained a severe trial, in the longprotracted sufferings, and untimely death of that fondly beloved youth, in whom he had concentered his whole sum of affectionate connection.

He who can

The very recluse life he has led, and will continue to lead, has an unquestionable tendency to deepen the gloom of this heart-rending disappointment. Yet, I think, he will not sink under it. No!his literary ardour will bear him up. You see, in the course of his last work, and its notes, that he was planning new poetic compositions, even while his griefs were all bleeding fresh. Time does everything for minds of that cast. bewail his sorrows to the world, will not become their victim. There is a mournful luxury in such pains, which has nothing in it of the severity of despair. Mr Hayley will always love to deplore, and to allude to his lost darling in future compositions. Affliction never overturns the sanity of a spirit which it does not first render indolent. Never will he, like poor Cowper, become the victim of religious despondency: the darkest and most incurable of all irrational feeling. O! what pests of human peace are those, who seek to instil the misery systematically, converting to deadly poison the bread of life in the Gospel!

Lo, within these few days, another subject of amazement! I am become an absolute Katterfelto, and do nothing but wonder." Here is Godwin's tragedy," said a friend, the leaves uncut. "I leave it with you, wanting time to read it to-day. It was damned you know." I replied, "Yes; the

author's politics, and yet more, his justly censurable heterodoxy, probably blighted its reception on the boards-but it must be good. The characteristic strength, the depth of thought, the heartgrappling interest, and the terrible graces of Caleb Williams, and St Leon, will nobly support the tragic muse. Yes; they will revive her laurels, withered, and in the dust, since Jephson forsook her. Sheridan had restored their vigour and bloom, if, in a fit of idleness, he had not dipt them in the still pool of prose; because it was nearer at hand than the Heliconian fountain. Godwin has not done so."

O, my stars, what short-lived exultation! How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of genius blunted! Is Godwin superannuated, that he could endure such stuff, as he wrote it? Is he mad, to commit, by its publication, this suicide on his fame? Such blank verse, there is no reading it! It halts and hobbles worse than the prose of a cobler, or a tailor, turned Methodist preacher. The plot improbable, extravagant, and without interest; the monarch a whiffling idiot, who knows not his own mind a single instant. The heroine, a silly inconsistent moppet, who breaks the vow she had made to her dying father, yet does not know she has done wrong; and then suffers herself to be bullied by a swaggering mad

man, into breaking her vows to a faultless and doting husband. A pretty atonement, truly, for her first fault. Peferable, surely, is the meanest sock to such a buskin! Nor is there any redemption for the general worthlessness, in one or two fine passages, which might be selected. Adieu !

LETTER LX.

EDWARD JERNINGHAM, Esq.

January 17, 1801.

I THANK you for having presented to me the second edition of your Essay on Pulpit Oratory, illustrated by extracts from Bossuet.

I find you not only considerably enlarged, but improved, from having strengthened your arraignment of our British style of sermon-writing, by some striking examples.

The censure passed upon our preachers for neglecting, or but coldly touching the awful themes of public calamity, is too well supported by the instance you give from Sprat; its echo from Calamy; the unimpressive use made by Stillingfleet