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E'en while a world's applausive charm
Bids thy pale André's closing breath
Revive, amid thy colours warm,

And triumph o'er opprobrious death;
And while that world may bid thy genius claim
The power to blazon Cook's immortal name.

Or while the universal voice

Shall hail thee the enthusiast child,
To whom, delighting in her choice,

Nature unveil'd her pictures wild,
And in Louisa flash'd along the lyre
A soul all fancy, and an eye all fire.

Still gratitude, her stores among,

Shall bid the plausive poet sing,
And, if the least of all the throng

That rise on the poetic wing,

Yet not regardless of his destin'd way,

If Seward's envied sanction stamp the lay.

Adieu Sir! and do not forget that Repton is

only seventeen miles from Lichfield.

LETTER IX.

REV. W. CROWE, Public Orator at Oxford, on his Poem, LEWESDON-HILL.

Lichfield, March 11, 1788.

PERMIT my grateful acknowledgement of a most welcome present, by which I think myself much honoured. My idea of the poetic, and musical talents of the donor, had been raised high by the song Seaton Cliffs. The hand of a master is discernible in its slightest sketch. The awful loneliness of marine scenery, with a blended sentiment of tenderness and intrepidity, breathe through the poetry, and through the music of that

stanza.

Lewesdon-Hill fulfils the promise of excellence, made by its beautiful little harbinger. If I did not fear to be obtrusive, I should speak to you with more discrimination over its graces, that glow with Shakespearean and Miltonic tints.

My correspondent, Mr Hardinge, that witty son of Themis, lately sent me a few sweet lines of yours, which compare something, a fair nymph I suppose, to the lily of the valley. I have never

seen the coy beauties of that flower so happily described. Observe how we begin to collect your scattered pearls.

The Grecian and Latian muses have engrossed too many of your golden years. Henceforth may their British sister possess exclusively your poetic leisure. Her claim upon the genius which arose in her clime is indisputable; and she has allowed pretensions to dispute for that clime the palm of pre-eminence with the real Parnassus, and with the bowers of Mæcenas. They have given the world no epic poet superior to Milton, no dramatic one that, in inventive genius, and intuitive knowledge of the human heart, has any shadow of equality with Shakespeare.

"Not Homer's self such matchless honours won,
The Greek had rivals, but our Shakespeare none."

I remain, Sir, &c.

* See the Rev. Mr Seward's verses, written at Stratfordupon-Avon, in Dodsley's Miscellany. They are printed anenymously.-S.

LETTER X.

MRS PIOZZI.

Lichfield, March 13, 1788.

AGAIN do I intrude upon your attention, dear Madam, to prove my obedience to your injunctions, that I should read and examine the Della Cruscas and Anna Matildas. But for your recommendation I should probably never have read them, being inserted in a magazine into which there is no looking without being shocked by some outrage or other against genius or worth.

I confess to you I did not like Mr Merry's Paulina. You saw that disapprobation in the coldness and hesitation with which I replied to your question, asked with an air of interest in the author that checked my ingenuousness.

Internal conviction is to me very impressive, that the Anna Matildas, as well as Della Cruscas, are Merry's; the seldom beauties and frequent blemishes of each being so exactly of the same complexion. To the best poems he gives the Della Crusca signature. The first six stanzas of the Elegy on the last day of the departed year,

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are very pretty; the remaining sink into commonplace insipidity. The sonnet to Metastasio has that mixture of metaphor which is always wrong.

"Ah once, or warm'd by hope, or chill'd by fear,
I mark'd in doubtful joy thy wandering ray,

Held the fair promise of the coming day,
Then sunk beneath the sudden blow severe."

To hold a promise is strange awkward language. This sonnet makes Fortune, whom it addresses, a sun which, instead of sinking suddenly into eclipse, lifts up its hand and knocks him down. The

simile of the steel, with which the sonnet concludes, is unintelligible, to me at least.

The Embarrassment is nothing like a sonnet, though it assumes that name; and the thought upon which it turns is quaint and old-fashioned. The Ode to Horror, signed Anna Matilda, though it has enormous faults, forms, on the whole, a spirited imitation of Collins's Ode to Fear, though it by no means equals its original. Anna's poem to Indifference, with D. Crusca's answer to it, are each of them a twin-mixture of wild ideas and absurd appellations, illumined with flashes of poetic fire. Who would conceive that sensibility was meant to be addressed in the following verses?

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