Now my dear

should help me in the manner that you propose. It will be a large work, consisting I should imagine, of six volumes at least. The 12th of this month I shall have spent a year upon it, and it will cost me more than another. I do not love the Booksellers well enough to make them a present of such a labour, but intend to publish by subscription. Your vote and interest, my dear Cousin, upon the occasion, if you please, but nothing more! I will trouble you with some papers of Proposals, when the time shall come, and am sure that you will circulate as many for me as you can. I am going to tell you a secret. It is a great secret, that you must not whisper even to your Cat. No creature is at this moment apprized of it, but Mrs. Unwin, and her Son. I am making a new translation of Homer, and am upon the point of finishing the twenty-first book of the Iliad. The reasons upon which I undertake this Herculean labour, and by which I justify an enterprize in which I seem so effectually anticipated by Pope, although in fact he has not anticipated me at all, I may possibly give you, if you wish for them, when I can find nothing more interesting to say. A period which I do not conceive to be very near! I have not answered many things in your Letter, nor can do it at present for want of room. I cannot believe but that I should know you, notwithstanding all that time may have done. There is not a feature

of your face, could I meet it upon the road by itself, that I should not instantly recollect. I should that is my Cousin's nose, or those

say,

those are her lips and her chin, and no woman upon earth can claim them but herself. As for me, I am a very smart youth of my years. I am not indeed grown grey so much as I am grown bald. No matter. There was more hair in the world than ever had the honour to belong to me. Accordingly having found just enongh to curl a little at my ears, and to intermix with a little of my own that still hangs behind, I appear, if you see me in an afternoon, to have a very decent head-dress, not easily distinguished from my natural growth; which being worn with a small bag, and a black riband about my neck, continues to me the charms of my youth, even on the verge of age. Away with the fear of writing too

often.

Yours, my dearest Cousin,

W. C.

P. S.-That the view I give you of myself may be complete, I add the two following items-That I am in debt to nobody, and that I grow fat.

LETTER XLII.

To Lady HESKETH.

MY DEAREST COUSIN,

I am glad that I always loved you as

I did. It releases me from any occasion to suspect that my present affection for you is indebted for its existence to any selfish consider

ations.

with any

other sensa

ations. No. I am sure I love you disinterestedly, and for your own sake, because I never thought of you with tions than those of the truest affection, even while I was under the influence of a persuasion, that I should never hear from you again. But with my present feelings, superadded to those that I always had for you, I find it no easy matter to do justice to my sensations. I perceive myself in a state of mind similar to that of the Traveller, described in Pope's Messiah, who, as he passes through a sandy desart, starts at the sudden and unexpected sound of a waterfall. You have placed me in a situation new to me, and in which I feel myself somewhat puzzled how I ought to behave. At the same time that I would not grieve you by putting a check upon your bounty, I would be as careful not to abuse it, as if I were a miser, and the question not about your money, but my own.

Although I do not suspect that a secret to you, my Cousin, is any burthen, yet having maturely considered that point since I wrote my last, I feel myself altogether disposed to release you from the injunction to that effect under which I laid you. I have now made such a progress in my Translation, that I need neither fear that I shall stop short of the end, nor that any other rider of Pegasus should overtake me. Therefore if at any time it should fall should feel yourself invited to say that

fairly in your way, or you

VOL. I.

X

I am

I am so occupied, you have my Poetship's free permission. Dr. Johnson read and recommended my first volume.

LETTER XLIII.

W. C.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

To JOSEPH HILL, Esqr.

Dec. 24, 1785.

"Till I had made such a progress in my

present undertaking, as to put it out of all doubt, that, if I lived, I should proceed in and finish it, I kept the matter to myself. It would have done me little honour to have told my friends, that I had an arduous enterprize in hand, if afterwards I must have told them, that I had dropped it. Knowing it to have been universally the opinion of the Literati, ever since they have allowed themselves to consider the matter coolly, that a Translation, properly so called, of Homer, is, notwithstanding what Pope has done, a desideratum in the English language, it struck me that an attempt to supply the deficiency would be an honourable one; and having made myself. in former years somewhat critically a master of the original, I was by this double consideration induced to make the attempt myself.. I am now translating into blank-verse the last book of the Iliad, and mean to publish by subscription.

W. C.

LETTER

It

gave me great pleasure that

1

you found my friend Unwin, what I was sure you would find him, a most agreeable man. I did not usher him in with the marrow-bones and cleavers of high-sounding panegyric, both because I was certain that whatsoever merit he had, your discernment would mark it, and because it is possible to do a man material injury, by making his praise his harbinger. It is easy to raise expectation to such a pitch, that the reality, be it ever so excellent, must necessarily fall below it.

I hold myself much indebted to Mr. of whom I have the first information from yourself, both for his friendly dispositions towards me, and for the manner in which he marks the defects in my Volume. An author must be tender indeed to wince on being touched so gently. It is undoubtedly as he says, and you, and my Uncle say, you cannot be all mistaken, neither is it at all probable that any of you should be so. I take it for granted therefore, that there are inequalities in the composition, and I do assure you, my dear, most faithfully, that if it should reach a second edition, I will spare no pains to improve it. It may serve me for an agreeable amusement perhaps, when Homer shall be gone and done with. The first edition of poems has generally been susceptible of improvement. Pope, I believe, never published one in his

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