tinguished unfortunate !—making cruel display of the horrid particulars of his insanity, over which good sense, compassion, and piety would shudder and draw a veil. This sermonizer speaks of the terrible ravings he specifies as unhappy mistakes of opinion merely; affects to account for them, and to warn and to guard the minds of other religious people from similar misconceptions. Unfeeling discloser of the secrets of that prison-house, in which the doctrines of thy school, hereditary cursedness, and the innate damnability of human frailty, had probably shut his soul, why dost thou not repair to Bedlam for other portraits of religious phrenzy, to the unquenchable fires of which, in all likelihood, the tenets of fanaticism had laid the train? Thou mightest, with equal propriety, warn and moralize upon them, as if the wretched originals were reasonable beings, only with erroneous opinions!

In Dr Parr's list of the literary characters of Cambridge, I confess myself disappointed not to find my dear father's name. Surely he had better pretensions to that honour than his namesake, Mr William Seward; that cold compiler of scraps of history, frequently without much interest in themselves, and always without any felicity of introduction or narration. My father, educated

at Westminster school, and Fellow of St John's, Cambridge, is known to the learned world as the chief editor, though in concert with Mr Simpson, of the best edition extant of Beaumont and Fletcher's numerous and admirable dramas. The large collection of notes to that work is almost exclusively my father's, as also the excellent preface. They abound in highly ingenious emendation, and in just criticism. His learned and able tract, the Conformity between Popery and Paganism, had great celebration in its day; nor less high in the estimation of the public were several of his occasional sermons, which passed the press. There are sweet little poems of his in Dodsley's Miscellany. Their author was well understood at the time that work appeared, though, by mistake, his name was not inserted. His eulogium on Shakespeare is amongst the number of those verses, and entitled, On seeing Shakespeare's Monument at Stratford upon Avon. They are given correctly in the first edition of those volumes; in later ones there is a word most ridiculously altered by the printers. I suppose they thought it a nice improvement to substitute a perfect for an imperfect rhyme, at the utter expence of the sense and unity of the metaphor-thus:

"Nor yet unrivall'd the Meonian strain,
The British eagle and the Mantuan swan
Tower equal heights."

They have changed swan to swain.

I do not think myself partial in believing those verses the most spirited tribute to the genius of our immortal dramatist which I have seen, not even excepting Milton's epitaph upon him. It grieves me that my father's memory should pass without its fame from the Ossian of oratoric praise, who strings his sacred harp and applausive lyre beneath the bowers of Hatton.

I inclose three of my songs, and flatter myself you will find the imagery and turn of thought original in all. Mr Hayley has often praised my song-writing. Translations and paraphrases excepted, I have always destroyed every little production of my own, if, on revising it, after the effervescence of composition had subsided, I could not find that it contained something original, either in the thoughts themselves, or in their combination. I was gratified about the first of these three songs by a lady having written to H. White from Lisbon, and observed that she found her oppressed sense of the sultry climate soothed and beguiled by repeating, twenty times a-day, that

ballad*, a copy of which I had given her a year before she left England. To be sure Shakespeare's exclamation questions the power of such sort of comfort:

"O! who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus!"

but then a Sirocco wind on the banks of the Tagus and actual cautery are two things. Adieu!

LETTER LXV.

MISS STEVENS of Milton, Derbyshire.

Lichfield, June 3, 1801.

YOUR request does me honour, and it would be an heartfelt satisfaction, could I prove instrumental to the preserved remembrance of talents and virtues, whose sudden terrestrial extinction cost me many sighs.

Your brother's poetic genius has more than

Song of a Northern Lover. All the imagery is that of a cold and mountainous country in winter.-S.

once thrown public lustre on my compositions, by the utmost elegance of classic encomium.

The track of epitaph is so beaten, that we find it difficult in the extreme to crop one fresh floret for the shrine of departed worth. In this instance, the limited number of lines, necessarily so narrow, increases the difficulty. The following lines, however, were literally an impromptu, written within a quarter of an hour after the receipt and perusal of your letter. They were laid by, without examination, during some days, that I might correct and improve them, after the effervescence of composition had subsided, and when, having forgotten them, I could perceive their merit or demerits as plainly as if they had been written by another person.

Thus premising, shall I confess that I think they would have pleased me as the production of a stranger; and that, upon repeated consideration, I know not how to mend them. The fourth line is picture, and not coldly copied from another's canvas. If, however, these lines should contain any thing which you, or other friends of the deceased, desire should be altered, I will endeavour to make them more what you would choose to see inscribed upon so dear a shrine.

I could wish them to be shewn to Sir Francis Burdett, before they are either altered or put on