They descended upon the sanguinary gloom of a calamitous and cruel warfare, like a tropic morning, which has no twilight.-Adieu !

LETTER LXXII.

REV. J. C. WOODHOUSE.

Lichfield, Nov. 1, 1801.

I CANNOT forbear to intrude upon you once more, with my thanks for your obliging letter, and effort to obtain from the Dean and Chapter, acceptance of mine and Mr Dyott's offer, and the rescinding of their anti-sylvan mandate; but they are inexorable.

When Dr Vyse destroyed the trees before his house, I told him that, sorry as I was to see the upper part of this area so denuded, I was still infinitely more sorry for the circumstance, as a

* The first reason alleged for this order of the Dean and Chapter was, that the money which the banished trees would bring, would gravel the walk. The author of these letters then offered to begin a subscription for that purpose with ten guineas, if the trees might be spared, and Mr Dyott of Freeford offered his teams, during a week, to fetch the gravel.—S.

dangerous precedent; that Mr Brereton and his tenants would be likely to adopt the same idea, viz, that the Dean's Walk trees made that house gloomy and damp; the Dean, that they produced the same injury to him; the Bishop, to his outhouses and stables, nay to the Palace itself, though it is one of the dryest houses that can be ; so that, ere long, we should entirely lose our shade and shelter. Dr Vyse, and every one else, disbelieved my prophecy, and rallied my fears. Alas! but one short year is passed, and the work of destruction is about to proceed! Dr Vyse called here the other morning, to say, that the Dean would not relinquish his plan, for that he thought the trees made his garden-wall green and damp! as if all old moss-grown garden walls were not necessarily green and damp in wet weather! also, that Mr Fell had complained of the same imaginary mischief from them to the house of Canon Brereton, in which he and his sister live. Thus is my prediction accomplishing, and, I have no doubt, will be accomplished to its last letter; for when these gentlemen find, as they will assuredly find, that their houses and gardens do not cease to be humid after this alternate demolition, they will impute the radical defect to the poor, straggling, disunited trees, which it is In consenow intended should be spared.

quence the decree will go forth against them, till no vestige of the present verdant beauty and shelter will remain to the Close of Lichfield. Those of the deprived inhabitants, who know the value of this luxuriant umbrage, will feel incessant regret, and utter fruitless philippics against its destroyers. Travellers will come, they who saw this area shaded and adorned, will come, and, indignantly cry out, Who has done this?

I have better hopes for our budding olives, though Grenville and Windham would scatter them to those bitter and blasting winds which, Dryden finely says, blow from every point of the compass, round the temple of Mars. I remain, &c.

LETTER LXXIII.

REV. RICHARD LEVETT of Lichfield.

Nov. 9, 1801.

If the frost had continued you had received a visit from me this morn, and seen your book returned by my own hands. The slippery greasiness of a damp day keeps me within doors, and

obliges me to request, by this billet, the loan of the ensuing volume, proceeding, I conclude, with these letters from Swift to Stella. Though I read the oddities as Pistol eats his leek, I have yet, as they are new to me, a desire to go on with them; since they draw, at intervals, the curtains of the court-cabinet, at an interesting period; and since they often present the names of Prior, Congreve, Addison, and Steele, which act upon my imagination like a spell. I am surprised, however, not to meet the name of Pope here, with whom Swift lived in so much intimacy. It is odd he should not have seen him during a year's elapse. His name had been replete with yet stronger magic. I cannot resist the desire of raking yet farther into this journalizing rubbish, for thinly-scattered pearls.

What inevitable wonder that a man of so much ability could disgrace his better sense, and the understanding of his Stella, by such bald, disjointed, canting prate, as would disgrace an old woman, scribbling to her granddaughters.

When I would consider Swift as a man of genius,

"These daily loads of skimble-scamble stuff
Do put me from my faith."

They inspire also the worst possible opinion of Swift's moral rectitude, since we know, that at the very period when these mawkish, doting letters were addressed to his real, though unowned wife, he was seducing the affections and chastity of the young and lovely Esther Vanhomrigh, to whom his letters, which I have read, are equally fond; on whom he wrote the beautiful, though dishonourable, poem, Cadenus and Vanessa, which insinuates that voluptuous connection, which his letters to her more than insinuate, in all the coffee passages. Mark how he avoids exciting the jealousy of Stella in these journals, by not once mentioning to her the young creature, whom his desertion drove to despair and suicide! When he records his frequent visits to Vanessa's mother, he takes care to complain of them as stupid uninteresting lounges.-The hypocrite!