ten times easier to understand than the crabbed epigrams and scribblements of the minor poets, that are generally put into the hands of boys. I took particular notice of the neatness of John's Greek character, which (let me tell you) deserves its share of commendation; for to write the language legibly is not the lot of every man who can read it. Witness myself for one.

me.

I like the little ode of Huntingford's that you sent In such matters we do not expect much novelty, or much depth of thought. The expression is all in all, which to me at least appears to be faultless. Yet Huntingford's Monostrophics have been my ratsbane for these six months past. Not a Review has been published, I think, (a Monthly one at least,) of which they have not occupied a third part. The learned Poet, it seems, had the misfortune to meet with a more learned Critic. The Critic found many faults in his Greek. The Poet justified. The Critic replied; and though this controversy was conducted on the part of both with the utmost good temper, mine, I must confess, has been sometimes a little ruffled by the length of it. I wish, said I to myself, that if men must needs write odes, they would write them in a language of which they are sure they are masters.

that

me,

But oh! what is Huntingford to Robert Heron, Esq.? Have you seen that man's Letters of Literature ? If you have, then I beseech you, with say you have seen the vainest, the cruellest, the most unjustifiable attack upon the most eminent writers that was ever made. I should long to see him well and handsomely chastised, if I did not account him beneath

the notice of any man equal to the task. But he that can find no beauties in Virgil, and, which is worse, not a single instance of the sublime in Scripture, must either belie himself, or be of all creatures that live, the most destitute of taste and sensibility.

Adieu, my dear William! We are well, and you and yours are ever the objects of our affection.

W. C.

TO LADY HESKETH.

MY DEAREST COUSIN,

I AM glad that I always loved you as I did. It releases me from any occasion to suspect that my present affection for you is indebted for its existence to any selfish considerations. No, I am sure I love you disinterestedly, and for your own sake, because I never thought of you with any other sensations than those of the truest affection, even while I was under the influence of a persuasion that I should never hear from you again. But with my present feelings, superadded to those that I always had for you, I find it no easy matter to do justice to my sensations. I perceive myself in a state of mind similar to that of the traveller, described in Pope's Messiah, who, as he passes through a sandy desert, starts at the sudden and unexpected sound of a waterfall. You have placed me in a situation new to me, and in which I feel myself somewhat puzzled how I ought to behave. At the same time that I would not grieve you, by putting a check upon your bounty, I would be as

careful not to abuse it, as if I were a miser, and the question not about your money, but my own.

Although I do not suspect that a secret to you, my cousin, is any burthen, yet having maturely considered that point, since I wrote my last, I feel myself altogether disposed to release you from the injunction, to that effect, under which I laid you. I have now made such a progress in my translation, that I need neither fear that I shall stop short of the end, nor that any other rider of Pegasus should overtake me. Therefore if at any time it should fall fairly in your way, or you should feel yourself invited to say I am so occupied, you have my poetship's free permission. Dr. Johnson read, and recommended my first volume.

W. C.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Nov. 5, 1785.

WERE it with me as in days past, you should have no cause to complain of my tardiness in writing. You supposed that I would have accepted your packet as an answer to my last; and so indeed I did and felt myself overpaid, but though a debtor, and deeply indebted too, had not wherewithal to discharge the arrear. You do not know nor suspect what a conquest I sometimes gain, when I only take up the pen with a design to write. Many a time have I resolved to say to all my few correspondents,-"I take my leave of you for the present; if I live to see better days, you shall hear from me again." I have been driven to the very verge of this measure; and, even upon this occa

sion, was upon the point of desiring Mrs. Unwin to become my substitute. She, indeed, offered to write in my stead; but fearing that you would understand me to be even worse than I am, I rather chose to answer for myself. So much for a subject with which I could easily fill the sheet, but with which I have occupied too great a part of it already. It is time that I should thank you, and return you Mrs. Unwin's thanks for your Narrative. I told you, in my last, in what manner I felt myself affected by the abridgement of it contained in your letter; and have therefore only to add, upon that point, that the impression made upon me by the relation at large was of a like kind. I envy all that live in the enjoyment of a good hope, and much more all who die to enjoy the fruit of it: but I recollect myself in time; I resolved not to touch that chord again, and yet was just going to trespass upon my resolution. As to the rest, your history of your happy niece is just what it should be,-clear, affectionate, and plain; worthy of her, and worthy of yourself. How much more beneficial to the world might such a memorial of an unknown, but pious and believing child, eventually prove, would the supercilious learned condescend to read it, than the history of all the kings and heroes that ever lived! But the world has its objects of admiration, and God has objects of his love. Those make a noise and perish; and these weep silently for a short season, and live for ever. I had rather have been your niece, or the writer of her story, than any Cæsar that ever thundered.

The vanity of human attainments was never so conspicuously exemplified as in the present day. The

sagacious moderns make discoveries, which, how useful they may prove to themselves I know not; certainly they do no honour to the ancients. Homer and Virgil have enjoyed, (if the dead have any such enjoyments,) an unrivalled reputation as poets through a long succession of ages: but it is now shrewdly suspected that Homer did not compose the poems for which he has been so long applauded; and it is even asserted by a certain Robert Heron, Esq. that Virgil never wrote a line worth reading. He is a pitiful plagiary; he is a servile imitator, a bungler in his plan, and has not a thought in his whole work that will bear examination. In short, he is any thing but what the literati for two thousand years have taken him to be a man of genius, and a fine writer. I fear that Homer's case is desperate. After the lapse of so many generations, it would be a diffiult matter to elucidate a question which time and modern ingenuity together combine to puzzle. And I suppose that it were in vain for an honest plain man to enquire, " If Homer did not write the Iliad and the Odyssey, who did?" The answer would undoubtedly be—" It is no matter; did not which is all that I undertook to prove." For Virgil, however, there still remains some consolation. The very same Mr. Heron, who finds no beauties in the Æneid, discovers not a single instance of the sublime in Scripture. Particularly, he says, speaking of the prophets, that Ezekiel, although the filthiest of all writers, is the best of them. He, therefore, being the first of the learned who has reprobated even the style of the Scriptures, may possibly make the fewer proselytes to his judgement of a heathen writer. For my

he