studies our genius may direct us, studies they must still be. I am persuaded that Milton did not write his Paradise Lost, nor Homer his Iliad, nor Newton his Principia, without immense labour. Nature gave them a bias to their respective pursuits, and that strong propensity, I suppose, is what we mean by genius. The rest they gave themselves. "Macte esto," therefore have no fears for the issue! - which I I have had a second kind letter from friend Mr. your have just answered. I must not, I find, hope to see him here; at least I must not much expect it. He has a family that does not permit him to fly southward. I have also a notion that we three could spend a few days comfortably together, especially in a country like this, abounding in scenes with which I am sure you would both be delighted. Having lived till lately at some distance from the spot that I now inhabit, and having never been master of any sort of vehicle whatever, it is but just now that I begin myself to be acquainted with the beauties of our situation. To you I may hope, one time or other, to show them; and shall be happy to do it when an opportunity offers. Yours, most affectionately, W. C. CCLIV.-TO LADY HESKETH. The Lodge, Jan. 1, 1788. Now for another story almost incredible! A story that would be quite such, if it was not certain that you give me credit for any thing; I have read the poem for the sake of which you sent the paper, and was much entertained by it. You think it, perhaps, as very well you may, the only piece of that kind that was ever produced. It is indeed original, for I dare say Mr. Merry never saw mine; but certainly it is not unique, For most true it is, my dear, that ten years since, having a letter to write to a friend of mine, to whom I could write any thing, I filled a whole sheet with a composition both in measure and in manner precisely similar. I have in vain searched for it. It is either burnt or lost. Could I have found it you would have had double postage to pay. For that one man in Italy and another in England, who never saw each other, should stumble on a species of verse in which no other man ever wrote (and I believe that to be the case), and upon a style and manner too of which, I suppose, that neither of them had ever seen an example, appears to me so extraordinary a fact that I must have sent you mine, whatever it had cost you, and am really vexed that I cannot authenticate the story by producing a voucher. The measure I recollect to have been perfectly the same, and, as to the manner, I am equally sure of that, and from this circumstance, that Mrs. Unwin and I never laughed more at any production of mine, perhaps not even at John Gilpin. But for all this, my dear, you must, as I said, give me credit; for the thing itself is gone to that limbo of vanity, where alone, says Milton, things lost on earth are to be met with. Said limbo is, as you know, in the moon, whither I could not at present convey myself without a good deal of difficulty and inconvenience. This morning being the morning of New Year's day, I sent to the Hall a copy of verses addressed to Mrs. Throckmorton, entitled, The Wish, or the Poet's New Year's Gift. We dine there to-morrow, when, I suppose, I shall hear news of them. Their kindness is so great, and they seize with such eagerness every opportunity of doing all they think will please us, that I held myself almost in duty bound to treat them with this stroke of my profession. The small-pox has done, I believe, all that it has to do at Weston. Old folks, and even women with child have been inoculated. We talk of our freedom, and some of us are free enough, but not the poor. Dependent as they are upon parish bounty, they are sometimes obliged to submit to impositions which, perhaps, in France itself, could hardly be paralleled. Can man or woman be said to be free who is commanded to take a distemper, sometimes at least mortal, and in circumstances most likely to make it so? No circumstance whatever was permitted to exempt the inhabitants of Weston. The old as well as the young, and the pregnant as well as they who had only themselves within them, have been inoculated. Were I asked who is the most arbitrary sovereign on earth? I should answer, neither the king of France nor the grand signior, but an overseer of the poor in England. I am, as heretofore, occupied with Homer: my present occupation is the revisal of all I have done, viz., of the first fifteen books. I stand amazed at my own increasing dexterity in the business, being verily persuaded that, as far as I have gone, I have improved the work to double its value. That you may begin the new year, and end it in all health and happiness, and many more when the present shall have been long an old one, is the ardent wish of Mrs. Unwin, and of yours, my dearest coz, most cordially, W. C. CCLV.-TO THE REV. WALTER BAGOT. MY DEAR FRIEND, Weston, Jan. 5, 1788. I thank you for your information concerning the author of the translation of those lines. Had a man of less note and ability than Lord Bagot produced it, I should have been discouraged. As it is, I comfort myself with the thought, that even he accounted it an achievement worthy of his powers, and that even he found it difficult. Though I never had the honour to be known to his lordship, I remember him well at Westminster, and the reputation in which he stood there. Since that time I have never seen him except once, many years ago in the House of Commons, when I heard him speak on the subject of a drainage bill better than any member there. My first thirteen books have been criticised in London; have been by me accommodated to those criticisms, returned to London in their improved state, and sent back to Weston with an imprimantur. This would satisfy some poets less anxious than myself about what they expose in public; but it has not satisfied me. I am now revising them again by the light of my own critical taper, and make more alterations than at the first. But are they improvements? you will ask-Is not the spirit of the work endangered by all this attention to correctness? I think and hope that it is not. Being well aware of the possibility of such a catastrophe, I guard particularly against it. Where I find that a servile adherence to the original would render the passage less animated than it should be, I still, as at the first, allow myself a liberty. On all other occasions I prune with an unsparing hand, determined that there shall not be found in the whole translation an idea that is not Homer's. My ambition is, to produce the closest copy possible, and at the same time as harmonious as I know how to make it. This being my object, you will no longer think, if indeed you have thought so at all, that I am unnecessarily and overmuch industrious. The original surpasses every thing, it is of an immense length, is composed in the best language ever used upon earth, and deserves, indeed demands, all the labour that any translator, be he who he may, can possibly bestow on it. Of this I am sure, and your brother the good bishop is of the same mind, that, at present, mere English readers know no more of Homer in reality than if he had never been translated. That consideration indeed it was, which mainly induced me to the undertaking; and if after all, either through idleness or dotage upon what I have already done, I leave it chargeable with the same incorrectness as my predecessors, or indeed with any other that I may be able to amend, I had better have amused myself otherwise. And you I know are of my opinion. I send you the clerk's verses, of which I told you: they are very clerklike, as you will perceive. But plain truth in plain words seemed to me to be the ne plus ultra of composition on such an occasion. I might have attempted something very fine, but then the persons principally concerned, viz., my readers, would not have un. derstood me. If it puts them in mind that they are mortal, its best end is answered. My dear Walter, adieu! yours, faithfully, W. C. CCLVI.-To LADY HESKETH. The Lodge, Jan. 19, 1788. When I have prose enough to fill my paper, which is always the case when I write to you, I cannot find in my heart to give a third part of it to verse. Yet this I must do, or I must make my pacquets more costly than worshipful, by doubling the postage upon you, which I should hold to be unreasonable. See then the true reason why I did not send you that same scribblement till you desired it. The thought which naturally presents itself to me on all such occasions is this-Is not your cousin coming? Why are you impatient? Will it not be time enough to show her your fine things when she arrives? Fine things indeed I have few. He who has Homer to transcribe may well be contented to do little else. As when an ass, being harnessed with ropes to a sand cart, drags with hanging ears his heavy burden, neither filling the long echoing streets with his harmonious bray, nor throwing up his heels behind, frolicksome and airy, as asses less engaged are wont to do; so I, satisfied to find myself indispensably obliged to render into the best possible English metre eight and forty Greek books of which the two finest poems in the world consist, account it quite sufficient, if I may at last achieve that labour; and seldom allow myself those pretty little vagaries in which I should otherwise delight, and of which, if I should live long 'enough, I intend hereafter to enjoy my fill. This is the reason, my dear cousin, if I may be permitted to call you so in the same breath with which I have uttered this truly heroic comparison; this is the reason why I produce at present but few occasional poems, and the preceding reason is that which may account satisfactorily enough for my withholding the very few that I do produce. A thought sometimes strikes me before I rise; if it runs readily into verse, and I can finish it before breakfast, it is well; otherwise it dies and is forgotten; for all the subsequent hours are devoted to Homer. I The day before yesterday I saw for the first time Bunbury's new print, the Propagation of a Lie.' Mr. Throckmorton sent it for the amusement of our party. Bunbury sells humour by the yard, and is, suppose, the first vender of it who ever did so. He cannot, therefore, be said to have humour without measure (pardon a pun, my dear, from a man who has not made one before, these forty years) though he may certainly be said to be immeasurably droll. The original thought is good, and the exemplification of it in those very expressive figures, admirable. A poem on the same subject, displaying all that is displayed in those attitudes, and in those features (for faces they can hardly be called), would be most excellent. The affinity of the two arts, viz., verse and painting, has been often observed; possibly the happiest illustration of it would be found if some poet would ally himself to some draftsman as Bunbury, and undertake to write every thing he should draw. Then let a musician be admitted of the party. He should compose the said poem, adapting notes to it exactly accommodated to the theme; so should the sister arts be proved to be indeed sisters, and the world die of laughing. W. C. CCLVII.-To LADY HESKETH. MY DEAREST COUSIN, The Lodge, Jan. 30, 1788. It is a fortnight since I heard from you, that is to say a week longer than you have accustomed me to wait for a letter. I do not forget that you have recommended it to me, on occasions somewhat similar, to banish all anxiety, and to ascribe your silence only to the interruptions of company. Good advice, my dear, but not easily taken by a man circumstanced as I am. I have learned in the school of adversity, a school from which I have no expectation that I shall ever be dismissed, to apprehend the worst, and have ever found it the only course in which I can indulge myself without the least danger of incurring a disappointment. This kind of experience, continued through many years, has given me such an habitual bias to the gloomy side of everything, that I never have a moment's ease on any subject to which I am not indifferent. How then can I be easy when I am left afloat upon a sea of endless conjectures, of which you furnish the occasion? Write, I beseech you, and do not forget that I am now a battered actor upon this turbulent stage; that what little vigour of mind I ever had, of the self-supporting kind I mean, has long since been broken; and though I can bear nothing well, yet any thing better than a state of ignorance concerning your welfare. I have spent hours in the night leaning upon my elbow and wondering what your silence means. I entreat you once more to put an end to these speculations, which cost me more animal spirits than I can spare; if you cannot without great trouble to yourself, which in your situation may very possibly be the case, contrive opportunities of writing so frequently as usual, only say it, and I am content. I will wait if you desire it as long for every letter, but then let them arrive at the period once fixed, exactly at the time, for my patience will not hold out an hour beyond it. W. C. CCLVIII.-To LADY HESKETH. The Lodge, Feb. 1, 1788. Pardon me, my dearest cousin, the mournful ditty that I sent you last. There are times when I see every thing through a medium that distresses me to an insupportable degree, and that letter was written in one of them. A fog that had for three days obliterated all the beauties of Weston, and a north-east wind, might possibly contribute not a little to the melancholy that indited it. But my mind is now easy, your letter has made it so, and I feel myself as blithe as a bird, in comparison. I love you, my Cousin, and cannot suspect, either with or without cause, the least evil in which you may be concerned, without being greatly troubled! Oh, trouble! The portion of all mortals-but mine in particular. Would I had never known thee, or could bid thee farewell for ever, |