up in a week, so lightly are they covered by pu mice-stones and ashes. The conclusion of this sonnet is truly sublime. I should like to perceive language occurring to me capable of doing it justice; but of such propitious inspiration I have little hope. I deliver up my present leisure to Lavater, and remain sincerely yours.

LETTER LXXXV.

MRS PIOZZI.

Dec. 21.

AND So, my dear Madam, you wish me to write a tragedy. Alas! if I had powers, 1 have not leisure for an attempt, to which the polite, though probably mistaken, confidence you express in my abilities might else stimulate my exertions; yet, in despite of this encouraging confidence, the task would be attended with more anxiety than I have fortitude to encounter; and, if I had leisure to attempt, and courage to hope a conquest over all these restraining considerations, the recollection how coolly Jephson's noble tragedies have

been received, would freeze the Melpomenean ink in my standish.

Suffer me now to speak to you of your highly ingenious, instructive, and entertaining publication*; yet shall it be with the sincerity of friendship, rather than with the flourish of compliment. No work of the sort I ever read possesses, in an equal degree, the power of placing the reader in the scenes, and amongst the people it describes. Wit, knowledge, and imagination illuminate its pagesbut the infinite inequality of the style !—permit me to acknowledge to you what I have acknowledged to others, that it excites my exhaustless wonder, that Mrs Piozzi, the child of genius, the pupil of Johnson, should pollute, with the vulgarisms of unpolished conversation, her animated pages!—that, while she frequently displays her power of commanding the most chaste and beautiful style imaginable, she should generally use those inelegant, those strange dids, and does, and thoughs, and toos, which produce jerking angles, and stop-short abruptness, fatal at once to the grace and ease of the sentence;-which are, in language, what the rusty black silk handkerchief and the brass ring are upon the beautiful form of

the Italian Countess she mentions, arrayed in embroidery, and blazing in jewels.

Ah! madam, could I have thought that you would perpetually write, and commit to press, "sure enough," for certainly,-"I tried at him," for, I tried to persuade him," he hit it," for he discovered-with a large &c. of congenial and untranslatable expressions; especially, as you observe, in your charming letters to Dr Johnson, which are before the public, some much slighter inelegancies of this kind, in Addison's writings, and justly say that they are pardonable only from the graces and purity of style being less understood in his day than in ours. Upon the miracle of their descending from your pen, many of my literary acquaintance have written to me. How easily might you have removed-how well would it answer the trouble, of even yet, against future editions, removing these blemishes-these sullying veins from your gems! Such polish, far from diminishing, would add to the grace and ease of the work. What can be more light, easy, and gay, than the style of Lovelace's letters in the immortal Clarissa? And yet they are wholly free from colloquial barbarisms, as your Colossus used to term them. With what pleasure should I see this your cluster of intellectual jewels, appearing through future editions, in cloudless brilliance! That done,

and the Travels of Mrs Piozzi will be one of the first ornaments of that class of reading.

But my confessions of amazement are not yet terminated. All your poetic readers whom I converse with, unite with me in wonder to see you exalting, in this work, a strange, nauseous, vulgar poem*, above all other poetry; a poem whose general darkness is rendered more visible by a few flashes of genius; to see you asserting that it transcends every other poetic composition as much as the Apollo, the Venus, and the Flora Farnese transcend the sculpture of Sansovino. Homer, Virgil, Danté, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Gray, must, if this decision be just, resign the palm of excellence to Mr Merry. We scarce believe our eyes as we read!-especially after having read that beautiful Parthenopean Ode, which induces us to look up to the poetic taste and judgment of its author with so much respect. We look, and lo! she decrees the meed to a Pan, from all the Apollos, past and present.

And now, my dear Madam, can you forgive this naked sincerity from one who makes it a point of honour to speak her undisguised ideas, if she speaks at all, to her literary friends on their compositions. It was with equal freedom that I

* Merry's Paulina, or Russian Daughter.-S.

spoke to our poetic darling, Mr Hayley, of that ingenious and learned work*, in which wicked wit seduced him into the ungenerous conduct of betraying the cause of which he stood forth as the champion; and of increasing, by his sarcasms, the unjust contempt in which the unprotected part of our oppressed sex are held in their declining days; and it was thus that I acknowledged to him, amidst my warm admiration of all his other writings, that I thought his correct and polished tragedies, like Johnson's Irene, wanted force, variety, and fire.

You ask me if I am interested in the question, whether Hayley's Young Widow, Cornelia, or Moore's Zeluco, be the superior work. I am indeed interested in Mr Hayley's fame, and I have felt and admired the powers of Dr Moore's genius in the masterly portraits of his novel; but I have not read Cornelia; since, by what I hear of it, I do not believe it Mr Hayley's. Having twice published anonymously, and perhaps imagining that he may again so publish, produces, doubtless, the resolve he acknowledges, never to disavow any composition which the world chooses to impute to him; otherwise his silence concerning anonymous works, which are really his, would be

* The Old Maids.