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that ludicrous contempt, which every attempt to move the passions must create, made by those who do not know how to touch their springs.

Bossuet was a man of genius, so was Sherlock, so was Seed, so was Ogden, and so was Blair, for the newspapers inform me," that his pure and glowing spirit hath aspired the clouds." Our. existing clergy, of superior talents, preach very finely, and need not exchange their style for Bossuet's. I wish you could hear some of our pulpit-orators in this cathedral, for they are clear to convince, pathetic to persuade, and eloquent to charm.

The amor patria is fervid in my bosom. The superiority of English talents, in all the walks of genius, I proudly feel. The sons of the song, the pencil, and the lyre, support it more and more every day, and hour, and I burn to assert their claims whenever I see them questioned.

You have made excellent use of Mr Erskine's noble oration in defence of the Christian faith, against the impudent attacks of Paine; and on the virtues and intellectual powers of its great defenders, Newton, Boyle, Locke, Hale, and Milton. When I was at Buxton, in May last, I met with the Life of the late Dr Horne, Bishop of Norwich; and was beyond measure surprised to learn, from that tract, that the Bishop accused

Sir Isaac Newton of lurking infidelity; of having been secretly in league with the infidel writers of his day, to disgrace Christianity, and disprove its truth. The Bishop despises his planetary system, because it does not accord with the assertions of sacred history, or with the miracle recorded by Joshua, concerning the arrest of the sun and moon.

Have the goodness to present my grateful compliments to Lord Carlisle, and congratulations on Lord Morpeth's approaching nuptials with the lovely maid of the house of Cavendish, to which I am hereditarily attached, from reported virtues, and from political veneration. I remain, &c.

LETTER LXI.

REV. ED. ROBERTS of Dinbren, Wales.

Lichfield, Feb. 16, 1801.

It is at once in my power to thank you for your last letter, and for the too costly present of the Dinbren landscapes, from the pencil of our British Claude. Beautiful they surely are, though I could have wished them of more identifying re

semblance ;—at least that which is meant to represent my darling scene, commanded by the seat on the terrace, which zones your hill.

Had I not previously known what I had to expect, I should not have recognized the view. Those rich vallies are annihilated, that, from the spot in which the Deva emerges on the sight, intervene between it and the terminating mountains. Alike in vain do we look for that fine object, the Valle Crucis ruins, which, in the real landscape, are seen glimmering through the woods. Then the banks of the river have too little foliage; and, instead of frothing, as it does, through its rocky channel, it has, in this picture, a grey, smooth faintness, like plashes of rain-water on a common. And the noble mountains, intersecting and rising one above another, are here softened and hazed away into indistinctness.

I have, it is true, a lover's tenaciousness about that scene, who desires nothing so much as perfect resemblance to the form he adores.`

Assured that the friendly and accomplished artist had taken the utmost pains to make these views complete, I tried to conceal from him my want of consciousness, as I gazed upon that picture, that I was ideally standing on the Dinbren terrace, with the sweep of vales at my feet, their

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foaming river, and the grand disorder of those mighty mountains which close the prospect.

Glover must not know that these his admirable landscapes have encountered the fastidiousness of a too precise, too vivid recollection; or, I should rather say, one of them; for the other is Dinbrenic, though rain-fraught clouds conceal the Eglwseg rocks almost entirely, and though the bright meads and dusky copses of the lovely, though narrow valley, between your house and the mountain of Castle-Dinas Bran, seem melted into each other, as beneath shrouding rains. A very picturesque effect is produced by one of the clouds, which seems in the act of rolling over the bosom of that mountainous cone; but the sky is turbid and terrible in its tempestuous aspect.

The less identified view has the softest lights of a summer evening horizon, when the sun leaves his last smile upon the hills.

A fine farce is playing in the senate; a juggle, of which the blindest idolaters of the weak, credulous, and cruel administration, now acting by their journeymen, seem ashamed. A finesse of meaner and more treacherous cunning no time has witnessed.

If the king had really opposed Mr Pitt's wishes respecting catholic emancipation, he would have made a real, not a mock resignation; and by an

appearance, at least, of honest resentment, have acquitted himself of premeditated treachery; but answering, as he does, for the persistence of his successor in the system which has ruined this nation, he puts but a cobweb-veil on his perfidy to Ireland, which every person penetrates; even his partizans here are offering wagers that he comes in again before the close of the year.

In becoming a tool to this despicable business; in consenting to stand forward the incompetent screen of Mr Pitt's low and perfidious manoeuvres, Mr Addington acts beneath his own reputation, and deprives the nation of all rational trust in his integrity.

It is of the last importance to this country, that there should be a real change of ministry; that those should be called into power and action, who have uniformly demonstrated the impolicy and dangers of that system, which blasted our internal interests; confiscated our property in enormous and unprecedented taxation; and armed every nation against us. To its truly wise opposers we can only look with one hope, that is not insane, for rescue from our present perils, and preservation of the wreck, which yet remains, of British prosperity; a wreck which Mr Pitt, and his subservient senate, have made.

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