Kate, were responsible even for the difficult task of appropriate description, which shall not feebly melt into insipid generality, its invariable fate in the hands of a poetaster.

I thank you, and I thank your domestic friends, for my assured welcome at Wolseley Hall, if I should ever have the happiness of paying my respects there; but, alas! the deep maim of last March, makes me a reluctant traveller, and a troublesome guest. Adieu!

LETTER LXXVI.

REV. R. FELLOWES.

Lichfield, Dec. 19, 1801.

COULD I have arrested the short and fleeting day; could I have evaded the obtrusive claims, which swallowed up its hours; could I have averted the influence of dangerous disease from the frame of one of the dearest of my friends, which, during a week, produced in my mind an utter incapacity of attending to abstract themes, then had I not suffered several weeks to pass away since I received your late excellent publica

tion*, ere I gave it that reiterated perusal, that sedulous attention which it can so richly reward, ere I addressed you on its subject.

Accept, at length, my fervent thanks, involuntarily delayed, not only for the work itself, but for the high, perhaps too high, and most highly prized honour done to myself, and my publications, at the close of your benevolent note on Mr Godwin's dangerous philosophy.

Deeply impressed by the contents of this volume, I can truly say, that I do not think our language has any composition in divinity so just to the doctrines of the Old and New Testament; so demonstrative of their consistence, their wisdom, their equity, and their mercy. It is only to those malevolent spirits, and those misguided enthusiasts, that your books will not be welcome, and by whom they will be vilified; who make cruelty, partiality, and injustice, chief attributes of the Deity; who wish to promote the temporal misery of every human being, and who so confidently devote to eternal misery all those whom they cannot inspire with demon-haunting terrors, suddenly changing to presumptuous confidence, with abject homage to their Creator, utterly derogatory to the equity and loftiness of his nature.

* Religion without Cant.

Your volumes appear to me to condense all former wisdom of explanation; to render superfluous every future attempt to explain the mysteries of the Christian faith, to prove its justice, its rationality, and its benevolence.

The style of this volume, like that of its predecessor, is nervous and eloquent, with the exception of one habit of expression. Perhaps, had I known the title of your last work before it became irrevocable, I should have pleaded hard for the banishment of one word in the title page, which has an inelegant reviling sound; and in the table of contents to so serious a book, for the exchange of the word ladies to that of women.

You are probably unconscious how perpetually the phrase, as it were, occurs though these pages. In some few instances it may be happily applied; but seldom does it add force to remark, or prove a graceful apology for metaphor. It often gives a timid air to diction, and is more frequently an unsightly excrescence, than a fruit or flower in oratory.

But these are slight specks in a polemic luminary, to which we may apply what our great epic poet says of the sun :

"Pure source of light,

From whence inferior orbs may lustre draw."

A young clergyman of any judgment might stock himself for life with excellent sermons formed from these pages.

May the nation prove worthy of gifts so precious to its best welfare!-but I much fear that it will not; all the leading reviews are in the hands either of Calvinists or dissenters. The first will load your pure writings with redoubled obloquy ; the second will, with less acrimony, feel, but with some petulant soreness, the strength of your argument against separating from the established church for trivial reasons.

Such people may retard the rising fame of the noblest compositions from the infallibility with which the undiscerning many invest the decisions of reviewers; but truth and genius, by the aid of time, by the necessarily slow accumulation of the suffrages of those few, in every age and period, who are unwarped by interest, prejudice, or envy, will be enabled to disperse each shrouding mist, which, for an interval, obscures their beams.

LETTER LXXVII.

LADY ELEANOR BUTLER AND MISS PON

SONBY.

Lichfield, Dec. 20, 1801.

MOST kind, dearest ladies, is that attention, of which the precious, though melancholy, proofs lie before me. I cannot persuade myself to delay the united acknowledgments of Mr Saville and myself, even till the sad certainty is ours of the impending fatality at Dinbren. We are both very uneasy about the hopeless state of its hospitable warm-hearted mistress; and Mr S. is himself in a state of health to which inquietude and sorrow are very formidable.

The distress of poor Mr Roberts' mind has probably prevented his communication of my last letter, describing the dire alarm which the first of this month brought us for the life of Mr Saville, whose worth you so well know. It has left a sense of alarm and dread upon my mind, which perhaps will never leave it, though the immediate peril passed away; and though, with some drawbacks, he has continued amending;