She invites me into Norfolk, but alas! she might as well invite the house in which I dwell; for all other considerations and impediments apart, how is it possible that a translator of Homer should lumber to such a distance! But though I cannot comply with her kind invitation, I have made myself the best amends in my power, by inviting her, and all the family of Donnes, to Weston. Perhaps we could not accommodate them all at once, but in succession we could, and can at any time find room for five, three of them being females, and one a married one. You are a mathematician; tell me, then, how five persons can be lodged in three beds (two males and three females), and I shall have good hope that you will proceed a senior optime? It would make me happy to see our house so furnished. As to yourself, whom I know to be a subscalarian, or a man that sleeps under the stairs, I should have no objection at all, neither could you possibly have any yourself to the garret, as a place in which you might be disposed of with great felicity of accommodation.

I thank you much for your services in the transcribing way, and would by no means have you despair of an opportunity to serve me in the same way yet again. Write to me soon, and tell me when I shall see you.

I have not said the half that I have to say, but breakfast is at hand, which always terminates my epistles.

What have you done with your poem? The trimming that it procured you here has not, I hope, put you out of conceit with it entirely you are more than equal to the alteration that it needs; only remember that, in writing, perspicuity is always more than half the battle. The want of it is the ruin of more than half the poetry that is published. A meaning that does not stare you in the face is as bad as no meaning, because no body will take the pains to poke for it. So now adieu for the present. Beware of killing yourself with problems, for if you do you will never live to be another Sir Isaac.

Mrs. Unwin's affectionate remembrances attend you. Lady Hesketh is much disposed to love you; perhaps all those who know have some little tendency the same way.

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CCCIX.-To LADY HESKETH.

MY DEAREST COUSIN,

The Lodge, March 8, 1790. I thank thee much, and oft, for negociating so well this poetical concern with Mrs. and for sending me her opinion in her own hand. I should be unreasonable indeed not to be highly gratified by it, and I like it the better for being modestly expressed. It is, as you know, and it shall be some months longer, my daily business to polish and improve what is done, that when the whole shall appear she may find her expectations answered. I am glad, also, that thou didst send her the sixteenth Odyssey, though, as I said before, I

know not at all, at present, whereof it is made; but I am sure that thou wouldst not have sent it, hadst thou not conceived a good opinion of it thyself, and thought that it would do me credit. It was very kind in thee to sacrifice to this Minerva on my account.

For my sentiments on the subject of the Test Act, I cannot do better than refer thee to my poem, intituled and called " Expostulation." I have there expressed myself not much in its favour, considering it in a religious view; and in a political one, I like it not a jot the better. I am neither Tory nor High Churchman, but an old Whig, as my father was before me; and an enemy, consequently, to all tyrannical impositions.

Mrs. Unwin bids me return thee many thanks for thy inquiries so kindly made concerning her health. She is a little better than of late, but has been ill continually ever since last November. Every thing that could try patience and submission she has had, and her submission and patience have answered in the trial, though mine, on her account, have often failed sadly.

I have a letter from Johnson, who tells me that he has sent his transcript to you, begging at the same time more copy. Let him have it by all means; he is an industrious youth, and I love him dearly. I told him, that you are disposed to love him a little. A new poem is born on the receipt of my mother's picture. Thou shalt have it.

W. C.

CCCX.-To SAMUEL ROSE, Esq.

MY DEAR FRIEND, The Lodge, March 11, 1790. I was glad to hear from you, for a line from you gives me always much pleasure, but was not much gladdened by the contents of your letter. The state of your health, which I have learned more accurately perhaps from my cousin, except in this last instance, than from yourself, has alarmed me; and even she has collected her information upon that subject more from your looks, than from your own acknowledgments. To complain much and often of our indispositions does not always ensure the pity of the hearer, perhaps sometimes forfeits it; but to dissemble them altogether, or at least to suppress the worst, is attended ultimately with an inconvenience greater still; the secret will out at last, and our friends, unprepared to receive it, are doubly distressed about us. In saying this I squint a little at Mrs. Unwin, who will read it; it is with her, as with you, the only subject on which she practises any dissimulation at all; the consequence is, that when she is much indisposed I never believe myself in possession of the whole truth, live in constant expectation of hearing something worse, and at the long run am seldom disappointed. It seems, therefore, as on all other occasions, so even in this, the better course on the whole to appear what we are; not to lay the fears of our friends asleep by cheerful looks which do not

probably belong to us, or by letters written as if we were well when in fact we are very much otherwise. On condition, however, that you act differently toward me for the future, I will pardon the past, and she may gather, from my clemency shown to you, some hopes, on the same conditions, of similar clemency to herself.

W. C.

CCCXI. TO MRS. THROCKMORTON.

MY DEAREST MADAM, The Lodge, March 21, 1790. I shall only observe on the subject of your absence, that you have stretched it since you went, and have made it a week longer. Weston is sadly unked without you; and here are two of us who will be heartily glad to see you again. I believe you are happier at home than anywhere, which is a comfortable belief to your neighbours, because it affords assurance, that since you are neither likely to ramble for pleasure, nor to meet with any avocations of business, while Weston shall continue to be your home, it will not often want you.

The two first books of my 'Iliad' have been submitted to the inspection and scrutiny of a great critic of your sex, at the instance of my cousin as you may suppose. The lady is mistress of more tongues than a few (it is to be hoped she is single); and particularly she is mistress of the Greek. She returned them with expressions, that if any thing could make a poet prouder than all poets naturally are, they would have made me so. I tell you this because I know that you all interest yourselves in the success of the said 'Iliad.'

My periwig is arrived, and is the very perfection of all periwigs, having only one fault; which is, that my head will only go into the first half of it, the other half, or the upper part of it, continuing still unoccupied. My artist in this way at Olney has, however, undertaken to make the whole of it tenantable, and then I shall be twenty years younger than you have ever seen me.

I heard of your birth-day very early in the morning; the news came from the steeple.

W. C.

CCCXII.-To LADY HESKETH.

The Lodge, March 22, 1790. I rejoice, my dearest cousin, that my MSS. have roamed the earth so successfully, and have met with no disaster. The single book excepted, that went to the bottom of the Thames and rose again, they have been fortunate without exception. I am not superstitious, but have nevertheless as good a right to believe that adventure an omen, and a favourable one, as Swift had to interpret as he did the loss of a fine fish, which he had no sooner laid on the bank, than it flounced into the water again. This he tells us him

self he always considered as a type of his future disappointments; and why may not I as well consider the marvellous recovery of my lost book from the bottom of the Thames, as typical of its future prosperity? To say the truth, I have no fears now about the success of my Translation, though in time past I have had many. I knew there was a style somewhere, could I but find it, in which Homer ought to be rendered, and which alone would suit him. Long time I blundered about it, ere I could attain to any decided judgment on the matter; at first I was betrayed by a desire of accommodating my language to the simplicity of his into much of the quaintness that belonged to our writers of the fifteenth century. In the course of many revisals I have delivered myself from this evil, I believe, entirely; but I have done it slowly, and as a man separates himself from his mistress when he is going to marry. I had so strong a predilection in favour of this style at first, that I was crazed to find that others were not as much enamoured with it as myself. At every passage of that sort which I obliterated, I groaned bitterly, and said to myself I am spoiling my work to please those who have no taste for the simple graces of antiquity. But in measure as I adopted a more modern phraseology, I became a convert to their opinion, and in the last revisal, which I am now making, am not sensible of having spared a single expression of the obsolete kind. I see my work so much improved by this alteration, that I am filled with wonder at my own backwardness to assent to the necessity of it, and the more when I consider that Milton, with whose manner I account myself intimately acquainted, is never quaint, never twangs through the nose, but is everywhere grand and elegant, without resorting to musty antiquity for his beauties. On the contrary, he took a long stride forward, left the language of his own day far behind him, and anticipated the expressions of a century yet to

come.

I have now, as I said, no longer any doubt of the event, but I will give thee a shilling if thou wilt tell me what I shall say in my Preface. It is an affair of much delicacy, and I have as many opinions about it, as there are whims in a weathercock.

Send my MSS. and thine when thou wilt. In a day or two I shall enter on the last Iliad,' when I have finished it I shall give the Odyssey' one more reading, and shall therefore shortly have occasion for the copy in thy possession; but you see that there is no need to hurry.

I leave the little space for Mrs. Unwin's use, who means, I believe, to occupy it.

I am evermore thine most truly,

Postscript in the hand of Mrs. Unwin.

W.C.

You cannot imagine how much your Ladyship would oblige your unworthy servant, if you would be so good to let me know in what

point I differ from you. All that at present I can say is, that I will readily sacrifice my own opinion, unless I can give you a substantial reason for adhering to it.

CCCXIII.-To JOHN JOHNSON, Esq.

Weston, March 23, 1790.

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Your MSS. arrived safe in New Norfolk Street, and I am much obliged to you for your labours. Were you now at Weston I could furnish you with employment for some weeks, and shall haps be equally able to do it in summer, for I have lost my best amanuensis in this place, Mr. George Throckmorton, who is gone to Bath.

You are a man to be envied, who have never read the Odyssey, which is one of the most amusing story-books in the world. There is also much of the finest poetry in the world to be found in it, notwithstanding all that Longinus has insinuated to the contrary. His comparison of the Iliad and Odyssey to the meridian and to the declining sun is pretty, but, I am persuaded, not just. The prettiness of it seduced him; he was otherwise too judicious a reader of Homer to have made it. I can find in the latter no symptoms of impaired ability, none of the effects of age; on the contrary it seems to me a certainty, that Homer, had he written the Odyssey in his youth, could not have written it better; and if the Iliad in his old age, that he would have written it just as well. A critic would tell me, that instead of written, I should have said composed. Very likely-but I am not writing to one of that snarling generation.

My boy, I long to see thee again. It has happened some way or other that Mrs. Unwin and I have conceived a great affection for thee. That I should is the less to be wondered at (because thou art a shred of my own mother); neither is the wonder great that she should fall into the same predicament: for she loves every thing that I love. You will observe that your own personal right to be beloved makes no part of the consideration. There is nothing that I touch with so much tenderness as the vanity of a young man ; because I know how extremely susceptible he is of impressions that might hurt him in that particular part of his composition. If you should ever prove a coxcomb, from which character you stand just now at a greater distance than any young man I know, it shall never be said that I have made you one; no, you will gain nothing by me but the honour of being much valued by a poor poet, who can do no good while he lives, and has nothing to leave you when he dies. If you can be contented to be dear to me on these conditions, so you shall; but other terms more advantageous than these, or more inviting, none have I to propose.

you

Farewell. Puzzle not yourself about a subject when you write to either of us; every thing is subject enough from those we love.

W. C.