down stairs; but I trust they will maintain their station.

From the extracts I sent you, you have, by this time, received proof, that I did not call Addison's serious prose a water-gruel style, without having found it so, at least in some instances. Nothing wearies me like prosing about and about the good cardinal virtues in their old robes; but I like to see them glittering in the bright armour of Johnsonian eloquence.

Addison always appeared to me as tautological in his solemn prose as in his verse, when he

says,

"So the pure limpid stream, when foul'd by stains
* Of rushing torrents, and descending rains,
Works itself clear, and as it runs refines."

There can be no partiality in my boundless preference of Johnson's style, as a moral essayist, to Addison's. I am ready to confess the superiority of the latter in playful composition. Addison died before I was born, and Johnson hated me; against whose writings am I most likely to be prejudiced? But, in truth, I never suffer either personal affection, or dislike, to operate upon what I read. So if, as you insinuate respecting

* What an anti-climax!-S.

these two celebrated authors, I am blind to excellence, and feel myself fired with rapturous approbation where no excellence is, the defect lies in my taste, and in my judgment.

Your wit runs strangely away with you in criticizing poetry, or surely you would feel the happiness of Mr Hayley's simile for the fine luxuriances of genius, lopt away by criticism, when he compares them to Sampson shorn by Dalilah, of his strength-giving tresses. Similies are not expected to be minutely exact; it is enough, if the general resemblance is striking.

That author did not mean that time had made the frolic compositions of Chaucer heavy as lead-he uses not the word, but says "dark as lead." Time, rendering their language obsolete, may well be allowed to have made that metal dim, or dark as lead, that once was brilliant as steel and gold.

And what is Hayley's illustration of the bounds which prejudice affixes to genius, by an allusion to the pillars of Hercules, supposed, by the ancients, to fix the limits of the world; is that too sublime for your comprehension*? You!

* The three passages alluded to are in Hayley's Epistles on Epic Poetry.-S.

the classical, the learned!" And who's blind now Mamma, the urchin cried."

I could dissect many of Milton's sublimest passages, place their imagery and phrases in a ridiculous point of view, with the same ease that prejudice against the moderns induces you to ridicule fine passages in Mason and Hayley, and that envy induced Johnson so to criticise the beauties of Milton, Prior, Gray, &c. &c. hold a mirror to such critical sophistries.

"Soon as they forth were come to open sight
Of day spring, and the Sun, who scarce uprisen,
With wheels yet hovering o'er the ocean brim,
Shot parallel to th' earth his dewy ray.”

Be

Paradise Lost, Book 5.

When we place the sun in a chariot, we may mention its wheels; but personifying the sun as the word his implies, and arising from slumber, we must not give him wheels instead of legs.

"And the thunder,

Wing'd with red lightning, and impetuous rage,
Perhaps has spent its shafts, and ceases now

To bellow through the vast and boundless deep."

Natural history is here violated; the properties of lightning are transferred to the mere noise made by its explosion. Thunder is in itself in

noxious; and, after all, this dread instrument of Jehova's wrath is turned into a bull and bellows.

But O! while I thus transform myself into one of those unfeeling critics, of whom my spirit is so impatient, how sincerely do I abjure such sickly accuracy; like that by which you were jaundiced in your strictures on the beauteous extracts I sent you from Mason and Hayley. A nervous and manly understanding ought to shake such verbal prudery to air, as "the lion shakes the dewdrop from his mane."

LETTER XLVI.

MISS POWYS.

Lichfield, Nov. 10, 1786.

It was time to abandon your beloved retreat on the ocean's edge, spite of all the elegant comforts with which it has been invested by your active ingenuity.

"Now winter's turbid seas

Dash round the rocks, and dark the tempests lour,
And mourn the winds along the lonely shore."

Friendship, the heart's precious treasure, time wrests from us by various means-by the most awful and irreversible, have I lost another object of my regard. Humane and gentle, tender and attentive to all that could affect my peace, did I ever find Dr Knowles, who lately fell a victim to the duties of his profession. No medicine was found of power to expel the putrid venom from his frame, whose prescriptions had rescued so many from the grave.

Without the lustres of genius, or of that ignisfatuus wit, his intellects had strength and clearness his strict piety no shade of moroseness, and the kindness of his heart tempered a very inflexible sincerity. I must long regret the loss of such a friend.

Have you heard of the good fortune of that ingenious French lady, to whom we are indebted for Caroline de Litchfield? Doubtless you have read and admired that beautiful work. Gratitude for literary pleasures always interests good hearts, in the destiny of those who have bestowed them; therefore, I am sure you will be glad to learn, that the author of Caroline is indebted to the merits and graces of those volumes, for a transition from incompetence to the comforts of wealth; from the unprotected dependence

VOL. I.