sweetly. The more because the verse, whose images your feelings have found just, has been, by a certain would-be critic, called inferior to its two preceding ones, while I felt conscious that it is worth them both. Its marine picture was drawn from nature, and not from books. You tell me it is striking, and I know that it is original.

Eminently to the honour of Wales, and calculated to fan the flame of genius, is that patriotic institution which allots a silver medal to the best poem in its native language. But I am sorry to find that its poetic composition has such an absurd shackle. To make alliteration an indispensable duty, which is but an ornament, and ought never to be used with studied profuseness, is strange indeed. Your bards should combine to cast away such tyrannous fetters. Churchill has a couplet which happily enough ridicules all efforts to produce it :

"But now,

alas for me! who never pray'd For apt alliteration's artful aid!"

Neither should the poet take pains to avoid it, except the alliterating letter is an harsh one. In every ear, which suggests harmonious numbers, it has great spontaneity of growth. I have been

sometimes amused with the pedantic folly which asserts that it ought to be exploded, since we find it occasionally in all our beautiful versification, whether the lines be blank or chiming.

Accustomed to see you pleased with my writings, I venture to recommend to your attention two solemn sonnets of mine, which I have sent to Nichols for his Gentleman's Magazine, in return for a literary present he lately sent me. I hope his printers will not make nonsense of them by carelessness-but what has been may be. I think you will like them, because they were written from my heart-because their subjects come home to every bosom, and because their images are original.

Alas for the royal fugitives of France! Generous impulse regrets that they are taken back to a situation so irksome and so perilous; but if they were to have returned, carrying fire and sword into the bosom of their country, to make it bleed in vain, or to rebuild the Bastile, and disperse lettres de cachet, it is preferring two to the million to mourn their recapture.

LETTER XXVII.

MISS WESTON.

July 7, 1791.

Busy as I am, before my long excursion, that will so soon commence, yet I cannot resist an impulse to tell you, without delay, dear Sophia, how pleasing I find the hope of meeting you in Edwy's Eden. If all goes well, I shall be there about the 25th, happy to find you amid its bowers, or to expect you soon.

So, your brother is married at last, and your two families are to remain together. Sincerely and warmly do I wish that none of those evils, those jealousies of jarring interests may arise, which are so apt, where separate branches live beneath the same roof, to break and disunite the silver links of peace and concord.

As yet, I have read only the first volume of Boswell's Life of Johnson. What I foresaw has happened. That ingenuous pencil, which so well fulfilled the biographic duty, and painted the despot exactly as he was, when roaming the lonely Hebrides, has, at the impulse of terror, been ex

changed for a more glowing one; and, in this work, almost every thing is kept back which could give umbrage to Johnson's idolaters, by justly displaying the darker, as well as fairer, sides of the medal. All, however, but his idolaters, must detest the ungrateful duplicity proved upon him, when we find him speaking with slight, bordering upon contempt, of the then Mrs Thrale, in the zenith of his intimacy with her. Mr Boswell was not aware, that impartiality would compare what he said of her with what he said to her. "To hear you," says he, in his letters to that lady, "is to hear wisdom; to see you is to see virtue.” What despicable flattery was that, if he really believed the stores of her mind were trivial, and that she had no truth? while, if conscious that these imputations were unjust, his heart was at once thankless and malevolently false. Such, I confess, amidst all his gloomy piety, I always thought it. That conviction has not receded beneath the contempt of your charming friend, and of Mrs Montague, which his biographer has so indiscreetly, so impolitely recorded; nor beneath the lying assertion, that Gray was a dull fellow, and that there are but eight good lines in all his poetry. I hear Mason fares no better in the second volume. Dark and envious calumniator!

I both blame Mr Boswell, and wonder at him for the wanton, because unnecessary, inroads which a number of those records must make upon the feelings of many. But for them, his work had been of great value indeed. Entertaining, in the first degree, it certainly is; and, with the most commendable precision, exhibits the events of his life through all their series and changes. It contains a prodigious mass of colloquial wit and humour, which were certainly unrivalled. Let it, however, be remembered, that, to produce their eclipsing and resistless power, many things combined, which a wise and generous mind would not, for its own peace and health, consent to feel, even to possess that unequalled talent; viz. spleen, envy, boundless haughtiness, and utter callousness to all the mental sensibilities of others. I am of St Paul's mind, who says, where these things are, por alms nor prayers constitute goodness.

"Say thou, whose thoughts at humble fame repine, Shall Johnson's wit with Johnson's spleen be thine ?"

Mr Burke's book has greatly fallen in my estimation, since the replies have proved upon it much misrepresentation and suppressed evidence---have hunted its arguments into all their artful recesses, and demonstrated their sophistry.