duced me instantly to send for his poems. I was extremely surprised, for it was a name I had not once heard of, though I find his poems had been published some time. This superiority which Coleridge assigns to them, is just as founded as the asserted superiority of Schiller to Shakespeare. Wordsworth has genius-but his poetry is harsh, turgid, and obscure. He is chiefly a poetic landscape painter-but his pictures want distinctness. It is strange that Mr C. should, in that note, attribute originality to Wordsworth's expression, green radiance, for the light of the glow-worm. That light is perfectly stellar, and Ossian calls the stars green in twenty parts of his poetry, translated and published, before Wordsworth, who is a very young man, was in existence.

I who had always, since I first in childhood began to observe the characteristic appearances of the objects of nature, seen the stars and the glowworm effusing greenish beams, wondered, on my introduction to the muses, to find none of their votaries pointing out that tinge in the lustre of some of the largest and brightest, and in the light of the glow-worm. When Ossian came out, in my early youth, I was charmed to find him confirming, by his epithet green for the stars, the accuracy of my visual perception. The following lines are in my Langollen Vale:

"While glow-worm lamps effuse a pale green light,
Such as in mossy lanes illume the starless night.”

Coleridge, like most other good poets, uses the compound epithet very lavishly, aware, no doubt, of its power to condense sense, and to present poetic picture with suddenness and force. He pretends, in his preface to this the second edition of his poems, that, in compliment to the reviewers, he has abridged the number of his compound epithets. That surely could not be, considering the great plenty of them in this same second edition. He was certainly laughing at the critics by the mock humility of this unreal lopping.

Charles Lamb, several of whose poems are in this volume, is of the school of Coleridge, Southey, and Lloyd, and no contemptible disciple— but while he imitates, he does not equal them. Adieu !

LETTER X.

REV. F. JAUNCEY.

Lichfield, March 13, 1798.

You inquire, with an air of triumph, as if our national perils were vanished, if I still persist in venerating the opposers of those measures which have drawn such perils upon us!!! Let my three notes of admiring marvel, answer the question.

If you like the present situation of these kingdoms better than that in which they were before this war commenced, when Britain was great among the nations, I do not. If that situation is really altered for the better, our ministry ought to be acquitted. If it is not, those who exhorted them to abandon hopeless projects-to quit a falling cause, when the first pillar* of the league gave way, were the friends of their country. So I have long thought, so I shall ever think, and such will be the universal opinion in a very few more years.

* Prussia.

As to the answers to Mr Erskine's book, with the rest of the voluminous receipts to wash white the ministerial Ethiops, I have no leisure to give them; however, I did read Mr Gifford's first book. He is an able sophist-but I have not lost my memory. Against the measures which, from her high and radiant prosperity, have humbled this nation to the state of unjust requisition, and of a mendicant begging shillings and halfcrowns from lacqueys and washerwomen, all that Mr Erskine has collectively laid before the public was, from time to time, brought forward by the Hampdens, Sidneys, and Russels of the minority. Mr Pitt neither did nor could refute the accusations he did not even attempt to refute them. Had Gifford's fabrications been facts, the minister would have brought them to light in his replies to the reproaches he met for rejecting the pacific advances of the French Directory, or rather, as it was then called, the National Assembly. He did not deny the existence of those wishes on the part of France, and he combated the solid arguments that proved how much it was the interest of England to entertain the same wishes, by nothing but the shallowest sophistries, and by arrogant demands to be trusted with unexamining confidence. The majority of the senate, and of the nation, did trust him; and of that trust they are

now beginning to reap the bitter, bitter fruits. If, in their pride and obstinancy, they call them sweet, much good may they do them-the hardship is upon those who would have averted those evils, and are now obliged to share them.

You clergymen, who ought to have exhorted pacific measures, have been deeply to blame in your contrary conduct; and if the dreadful and remorseless French, whose vengeance we have provoked, should revolutionize this unhappy country, the clergy will be the first to feel the dire effects of their own adjurations. This, once for all, is my political creed. I shall not be able to change your opinion, nor can you alter mine. Fruitless, therefore, is it to make the miserable situation of these kingdoms a farther theme in our letters. A few of those I best love think with you. I do not love them the less, though I wonder more and more at their infatuation.

In a lately published miscellaneous volume, by one of the first poets of this period*- a period so rich in poetic talent, so poor in poetic patronage, I met with the following inscription for a column

Southey. He is, however, strangely mistaken in his assertion, that Hampden and Falkland fell in the same place. Colonel Hampden was killed in the battle of Chaldgrave Field near Oxford, and three months after Lord Falkland fell in the battle of Newbury.—S.