a lying spirit of criticism, incapacitates his dogmas for becoming umpires between literary friends, when they differ about any thing Milton has written. He decide, indeed! who asserts in his life of that poet, that nobody closes the leaves of the Paradise Lost with any wish of ever opening them again!!! Surely it is strange that you should say of him, who could so say, that " Milton has, on the whole, had due honour from Johnson." To me it appears, that whatever I praise he gives Milton, was for the purpose of giving an air of impartiality to his injustice, and keener edge to his sarcasms. But that his malice to Milton is so glaring, he might have a better right than yourself to dislike the sonnets of that poet, since his hatred to blank verse was allowed, and since they partake so much of its nature. That my opinions do not blindly follow the whistling of a great name, my confession that I cannot read a canto of Spenser without weariness may evince.

Adieu! my dear friend. I hope a few poetical dissentions may constitute the sum total of our disputes; and that excellent Mrs Whalley's recovery will shortly be perfect!

LETTER LXXVII.

H. REPTON, Esq.

Lichfield, July 15, 1789.

OPPRESSED respiration, my ingenious friend, produced by the sedentary employment of a too extensive correspondence, obliges me to submit to an epistolary regimen. It has many mortifica tions; not having earlier made my acknowledgments for your last is of the number.

Much, indeed, should I have liked making a trio with you and Mr Knight, in exploring the labyrinths of Hainault Forest. Emes made the same declaration about being indebted to our Needwood for lessons in the elements of picturesque gardening, which Brown avowed concerning that of Hainault. Emes laid out Beaudesert*, which is on the edge of Needwood, very finely; and is thus complimented upon the subject by Mundy, in his beautiful poem which celebrates and bears the name of our forest :

The seat of Lord Uxbridge.

"Emes who yon desert wild explor'd,
And to its name the scene restor❜d,
Here, fir'd by native beauty, trac'd
The footsteps of the Goddess Taste;
Won from her coy retreats, she came,
And led him up these paths to fame.”-

But if you do not transcend your predecessors in the art you have adopted, it will be strange. You, whom poetry and painting have so much. more bounteously endowed. Surely the best initiated in their mysteries, must be best qualified to make English nature dance her minuet de-lesArcades with the most consummate grace. I am happy to find the engagements of your new profession likely to lead you our way before this sullen and watery summer resigns the name she disgraces.

It delights me to glide into the Shakespeare Gallery on the wings of your Bee†, that, with so much industry and skill, collects the honey of genius from every separate effort in that art, which is now exerting all its powers in honour of our immortal bard. This little tract breathes the true spirit of criticism; not blind to the defects

*

Landscape-gardening.

+ A critical tract on the Shakespeare Gallery by this gentleman, entitled the Bee.-S.

of the great and the celebrated, yet exulting in their excellencies; desirous of encouraging inferior artists, by pointing out every gleam of merit in their works, and gently glancing at their errors; not to mortify by supercilious disdain, but usefully to correct the imagination and the hand from whence they proceed.

As to my exertions, I have ever made it a point to omit no duty, to neglect no claim of friendship, or even of civility, for the idle business of the muses. Generally finding the day too short for the various demands of the former, it is but seldom that I can make any addition to my miscellany, or attend to its revision; uncertain also whether, if I had time, I should have resolution to give it to the world. The arrogance and ignorance of the public critics, united to their strange influence upon the public opinions, keep dragon-watch around the Hesperian tree of fame. Some lines of mine, about fifty in number, had the honour of suggesting to Dr Darwin the first idea of the beauteous poem you mention, the new-risen sun of our poetic hemisphere. I wrote them in a valley near Lichfield, which was a mere morass, till drained, cultivated, and formed into a picturesque garden of botanic science, by the Doctor's forming hand. He had always very great poetic ta

lents. Resident in Lichfield till the year 1781, he became a sort of poetic preceptor to me in my early youth. If I have critical knowledge in my favourite science, I hold myself chiefly indebted for it to him. Warned by the malign influence which Akenside and Armstrong's poetic fame had upon their medical practice, he would never, till now, venture to appear before the world as a bard. When I shewed him the poetic sketch I had made of his valley, in the year 1779, he was pleased with it, and said it should stand as the exordium of a poem, which he, that instant, conceived might be written to advantage upon the Linnean system, and under the Ovidian licence of transforming trees, shrubs, and flowers into fine ladies and gentlemen. From that instant he began the brilliant work you mention, which has been the amusement of his leisure hours through all the intervening years. For some reason, inscrutable to me, he publishes the second part first. A friend of his, Mr Stevens of Repton, I believe, sent my verses, describing this valley, to the Gentleman's Magazine for May 1783, with some change, and some additional lines in their close, made by Dr Darwin, for my verses contain no mention of the nymph of Botany. From that magazine they got into almost all the pub