the piece which now employs me is in rhyme. I do not intend to write any more blank. It is more difficult than rhyme, and not so amusing in the composition. If, when you make the offer of my book to Johnson, he should stroke his chin, and look up to the ceiling and cry-" Humph!"-anticipate him (I beseech you) at once, by saying "That you know I should be sorry that he should undertake for me to his own disadvantage, or that my volume should be in any degree pressed upon him. I make him the offer merely because I think he would have reason to complain of me if I did not." -But that punctilio once satisfied, it is a matter of indifference to me what publisher sends me forth. If Longman should have difficulties, which is the more probable, as I understand from you that he does not in these cases see with his own eyes, but will consult brother poet, take no pains to conquer them. The idea of being hawked about, and especially of your being the hawker, is insupportable. Nichols (I have heard) is the most learned printer of the present day. He may be a man of taste as well as learning; and I suppose that you would not want a gentleman usher to introduce you. He prints the Gentleman's Magazine, and may serve us if the others should decline; if not, give yourself no further trouble about the matter. I may possibly envy authors who can afford to publish at their own expense, and in that case should write no more. the mortification would not break my heart. a But I proceed to your corrections, for which I most unaffectedly thank you, adverting to them in their order. Page 140.-Truth generally, without the article the, would not be sufficiently defined. There are many sorts of truth, philosophical, mathematical, moral, &c.; and a reader not much accustomed to hear of religious or scriptural truth might possibly, and indeed easily, doubt what truth was particularly intended. I acknowledge that grace, in my use of the word, does not often occur in poetry; so neither does the subject which I handle. Every subject has its own terms, and religious ones take theirs with most propriety from the Scripture. Thence I take the word grace. The sarcastic use of it in the mouths of infidels I admit, but not their authority to proscribe it, especially as God's favour in the abstract has no other word, in all our language, by which it can be expressed. Page 150.-Impressed the mind faintly, or not at all.-I prefer this line, because of the uninterrupted run of it, having always observed that a little unevenness of this sort, in a long work, has a good effect, used I mean sparingly, and with discretion. Page 127.-This should have been noted first, but was overlooked. Be pleased to alter for me thus, with the difference of only one word from the alteration proposed by you We too are friends to royalty. We love The king who loves the law, respects his bounds, You observed probably, in your second reading, that I allow the life of an animal to be fairly taken away when it interferes either with the interest or convenience of man; consequently snails, and all reptiles that spoil our crops, either of fruit or grain, may be destroyed if we can catch them. It gives me real pleasure that Mrs. Unwin so readily understood me. Blank verse, by the unusual arrangement of the words and by the frequent infusion of one line into another, not less than by the style, which requires a kind of tragical magnificence, cannot be chargeable with much obscurity-must rather be singularly perspicuous, to be so easily comprehended. It is my labour, and my principal one, to be as clear as possible. You do not mistake me, when you suppose that I have great respect for the virtue that flies temptation. It is that sort of prowess, which the whole train of Scripture calls upon us to manifest when assailed by sensual evil. Interior mischiefs must be grappled with-there is no flight from them. But solicitations to sin, that address themselves to our bodily senses, are, I believe, seldom conquered in any other way. I can easily see that you may have very reasonable objections to my dedicatory proposal. You are a clergyman, and I have banged your order; you are a child of alma mater, and I have banged her too. Lay yourself, therefore, under no constraints that I do not lay you under, but consider yourself as perfectly free. With our best love to you all, I bid you heartily farewell. I am tired of this endless scribblement. Adieu ! Yours, CLXXII.-TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON. MY DEAR FRIEND, W. C. Oct. 30, 1784. I accede most readily to the justness of your remarks on the subject of the truly Roman heroism of the Sandwich islanders. Proofs of such prowess, I believe, are seldom exhibited by a people who have attained to a high degree of civilization. Refinement and profligacy of principle are too nearly allied to admit of any thing so noble; and I question whether any instances of faithful friendship, like that which so much affected you in the behaviour of the poor savage, were produced even by the Romans themselves in the latter days of the empire. They had been a nation whose virtues it is impossible not to wonder at; but Greece, which was to them what France is to us, a Pandora's box of mischief, reduced them to her own standard, and they naturally soon sunk still lower. Religion in this case seems pretty much out of the question. To the production of such heroism undebauched nature herself is equal. When Italy was a land of heroes, she knew no more of the true God than her cicisbeos and her fiddlers know now; and indeed it seems a matter of indifference whether a man be born under a truth which does not influence him, or under the actual influence of a lie; or if there be : any difference between the cases, it seems to be rather in favour of the latter for a false persuasion, such as the Mahometan, for instance, may animate the courage, and furnish motives for the contempt of death, while despisers of the true religion are punished for their folly by being abandoned to the last degrees of depravity. Accordingly we see a Sandwich islander sacrificing himself to his dead friend, and our christian seamen and mariners, instead of being impressed by a sense of his generosity, butchering him with a persevering cruelty that will disgrace them for ever: for he was a defenceless, unresisting enemy, who meant nothing more than to gratify his love for the deceased. To slay him in such circumstances was to murder him, and with every aggravation of the crime that can be imagined. I am again at Johnson's, in the shape of a poem in blank verse, consisting of six books, and called the Task.' I began it about this time twelvemonth, and writing sometimes an hour in a day, sometimes half an one, and sometimes two hours, have lately finished it. I mentioned it not sooner, because almost to the last I was doubtful whether I should ever bring it to a conclusion, working often in such distress of mind, as, while it spurred me to the work, at the same time threatened to disqualify me for it. My bookseller, I suppose, will be as tardy as before. I do not expect to be born into the world till the month of March, when I and the crocusses shall peep out together. You may assure yourself that I shall take my first opportunity to wait on you: I mean likewise to gratify myself by obtruding my muse upon Mr. Bacon. Adieu, my dear friend! We are well, and love you. CLXXIII.-TO THE REV. WILLIAM UNWIN. MY DEAR FRIend, W. C. Nov. 1, 1784. Were I to delay my answer, I must yet write without a frank at last, and may as well, therefore, write without one now, especially feeling as I do a desire to thank you for your friendly offices so well performed. I am glad for your sake, as well as for my own, that you succeeded in the first instance, and that the first trouble proved the last I am willing too to consider Johnson's readiness to accept a second volume of mine as an argument that at least he was no loser by the former. I collect from it some reasonable hope that the volume in question may not wrong him neither. My imagination tells me (for I know you interest yourself in the success of my productions) that your heart fluttered when you approached Johnson's door, and that it felt itself discharged of a burthen when you came out again. You did well to mention it at the T--s ; they will now know that you do not pretend a share in my confidence, whatever be the value of it, greater than you actually possess. I wrote to Mr. Newton by the last post, to tell him that I was gone to the press again. He will be surprised and, perhaps, not pleased; but I think he cannot complain, for he keeps his own authorly secrets without participating them with me. I do not think myself in the least injured by his reserve; neither should I, if he were to publish a whole library without favouring me with any previous notice of his intentions. In these cases it is no violation of the laws of friendship not to communicate, though there must be a friendship where the communication is made. But many reasons may concur in disposing a writer to keep his work secret, and none of them injurious to his friends. The influence of one I have felt myself, for which none of them would blame me-I mean the desire of surprising agreeably. And if I have denied myself this pleasure in your instance, it was only to give myself a greater, by eradicating from your mind any little weeds of suspicion that might still remain in it, that any man living is dearer to me than yourself. Had not this consideration forced up the lid of my strong box like a lever, it would have kept its contents with an invisible closeness to the last; and the first news that either you or any of my friends would have heard of the Task,' they would have received from the public papers. But you know now, that, neither as a poet, nor as a man, do I give to any man a precedence in my estimation at your expense. I am proceeding with my new work (which at present I feel myself much inclined to call by the name of Tirocinium) as fast as the Muse permits. It has reached the length of seven hundred lines, and will probably receive an addition of two or three hundred more. When you see Mr. perhaps you will not find it difficult to procure from him half a dozen franks, addressed to yourself, and dated the 15th of December, in which case they will all go to the post filled with my lucubrations on the evening of that day. I do not name an earlier, because I hate to be hurried; and Johnson cannot want it sooner than, thus managed, it will reach him. I am not sorry that John Gilpin,' though hitherto he has been nobody's child, is likely to be owned at last. Here and there I can give him a touch that I think will mend him, the language in some places not being quite so quaint and old-fashioned as it should be; and in one of the stanzas there is a false rhyme. When I have thus given the finishing stroke to his figure, I mean to grace him with two mottos, a Greek and a Latin one, which when the world shall see that I have only a little one of three words to the volume itself, and none to the books of which it consists, they will perhaps understand as a stricture upon that pompous display of literature with which some authors take occasion to crowd their titles. Knox, in particular, who is a sensible man too, has not I think fewer than half a dozen to his Essays. Adieu, W. C. CLXXIV.-To JOSEPH HILL, Esq. MY DEAR FRIEND, November, 1784. To condole with you on the death of a mother aged eightyseven would be absurd-rather, therefore, as is reasonable, I congratulate you on the almost singular felicity of having enjoyed the company of so amiable and so near a relation so long. Your lot and mine, in this respect, have been very different, as indeed in almost every other. Your mother lived to see you rise, at least to see you comfortably established in the world. Mine, dying when I was six years old, did not live to see me sink in it. You may remember with pleasure, while you live, a blessing vouchsafed to you so long; and I, while I live, must regret a comfort of which I was deprived so early. I can truly say, that not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say a day) in which I do not think of her. Such was the impression her tenderness made upon me, though the opportunity she had for showing it was so short. But the ways of God are equal-and when I reflect on the pangs she would have suffered, had she been a witness of all mine, I see more cause to rejoice than to mourn that she was hidden in the grave so soon. We have, as you say, lost a lively and sensible neighbour in Lady Austen, but we have been long accustomed to a state of retirement, within one degree of solitude, and being naturally lovers of still life, can relapse into our former duality without being unhappy at the change. To me, indeed, a third is not necessary, while I can have the companion I have had these twenty years. I am gone to the press again; a volume of mine will greet your hands some time either in the course of the winter or early in the spring. You will find it, perhaps, on the whole, more entertaining than the former, as it treats a greater variety of subjects, and those, at least the most, of a sublunary kind. It will consist of a poem in six books, called The Task. To which will be added another which I finished yesterday, called, I believe, Tirocinium,' on the subject of education. You perceive that I have taken your advice, and given the pen no rest. CLXXV.-TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON. W. C. Nov. 27, 1784. MY DEAR FRIEND, All the interest that you take in my new publication, and all the pleas that you urge in behalf of your right to my confidence, the moment I had read your letter, struck me as so many proofs of your regard; of a friendship, in which distance and time make no abate |