the studious, as in the field of honour, and generous enough to encourage, and throw around it the lustre of his notice, is even more rare than his valour, and military skill. I wish his Lordship to see this letter. It will explain to him the nature of those convictions, aud of those feelings, which must be powerful indeed, ere I could hesitate a moment to follow his advice, though but insinuated on any subject. My devoted respects and good wishes are his, as they are your's, not periodically, but constantly.

LETTER LXXXIV.

MISS WESTON.

Lichfield, Dec. 12, 1787.

Ir is pleasant, dear Sophia, to hear what odd things people assert to support their opinions. It seems a strange sort of compliment to say, that pages, covered over with disclosures of the heart, on various subjects, and addressed to absent friends, are not, what they were intended to be, letters, but something, Heaven knows what is to be their name, of a totally different kind.

I am at present re-reading, with Giovanni, the by me often read scriptures of your idolatry, our great lyrist, Gray's Epistles; and find, as I was wont, much to admire in them;-yet those addressed to Mr West, before either of them were twenty, while they are full, even to affectation, of splenetic wit, terseness, point, and classical allusion, have no glow, either of the heart or the imagination;—and at a period of life when nothing can recompence their absence. André's letters, published with my Monody on him, have, to me, much more fascinating beauty. Their easy, playful, happy flow of humour, mixed with those fine emanations of lively affection, are infinitely more engaging in youth than that satiric vein which runs through Gray's, and than that comfortless vapourishness, of which they complain. In André's also we find tender enthusiasm, and all those juvenile graces, of which the other are destitute.

There is the same fault in the highly ingenious letters of his riper years-but it sits better on the man than on the boy. They are patterns of wit; but wit is too constantly the master-tint; and therefore is it that the style has not that variety necessary to the perfection of confidential letters. The first models of perfection in the epistolary style are the letters of Clarissa, Miss Howe,

Lovelace, and Belford, in the immortal volumes of Richardson.

With such able assistance as Mr Potter's, there is not much wonder that P. produces poems which contain some good passages. Mr Potter, I am told, lives wholly in retirement. A man of talents, upon whom the world's neglect has borne hard. Adieu !

LETTER LXXXV.

REV. T. S. WHALLEY.

Lichfield, Dec. 20, 1787.

ALAS! my friend, that ever pain and sickness should impede the exertions of so warm, so clear a spirit!—But the sullen fiends were retreating when you wrote; that was a great comfort; and Mrs Piozzi and Miss Williams speak in a style to confirm my hopes.

The fair Helen Williams is delighted with the visit you paid her at Southampton. It has filled her imagination with your talents, and with the wonders of Mont Blanc. When will your poem B b

VOL. I.

on that theme appear? I asked you this question in my last. Answer me, naughty boy! Can't you speak when a gentlewoman asks you a civil question?

I am charmed that Mrs Piozzi likes me well enough to dream that I have beauty; and I feel happy in having contributed, in the slightest degree, to her wishes.

After poetic fame, I confess I often feel very ardent aspirations; yet are they but a short-lived blaze, and fade away into embers, that scarcely gleam. No fuel more potent can be given them, than your seeming interested that I should publish what I have written. It is needful enough to prevent the very embers from being extinguished by the stupidity or venality, the malice or ignorance of the public critics, and by the oppressive complication of my various employments. Uniting with the constant attention my father's weak and precarious state demands, they do not leave me an hour in a week for transcribing and correcting those materials, whose sometime publication I meditate, and perhaps shall never do more than meditate.

My witty and volatile correspondent, Mr Hardinge, has lately sent me very agreeable letters' from his friend and correspondent, Lord Camelford, now on the Continent. There is one de

would have been more in his place in the quiet vales of Boconoli."

And thus Lord Camelford.-I have, within this past week, looked into Mrs Dobson's Petrarch, which you told me is an abridgement of the Abbé de Sade's Life of that Poet. Mrs Dobson describes the Valley of Vaucluse as luxuriantly sylvan, and of incomparable beauty. There is no saying what devastations time may not have made; but I wonder her original did not supply her with reflections upon its present contrasting appearance, so rude and barren; that she did not inform herself, from recent visitants to a scene so remarkable, that it was shorn of its woods, and that not a leaf of the love-planted laurels remained. Equally strange, that she should make no mention of the Castle de Sommane, where Laura always resided during the summer months, and which remains to this day the property of her direct descendents. The desire of Petrarch to be near his mistress, accounts for the time which he habitually passed in that valley, and for his local devotion.

If Lord Camelford had known to whom that ruined castle once, nay, to whom it yet belongs, he had surely not expressed his wonder at Petrarch's choice of retreat, nor fancied he could