sent to the artist. These, however, will be gone, as I believe I told you, before you arrive, at which time I know not that any body will be here, except my Johnny, whose presence will not at all interfere with our readings-you will not, I believe, find me a very slashing critic-I hardly indeed expect to find anything in your Life of Milton that I shall sentence to amputation. How should it be too long? A well-written work, sensible and spirited, such as yours was when I saw it, is never so. But, however, we shall see. I promise to spare nothing that I think may be lopped off with advantage. I began this letter yesterday, but could not finish it till now. I have risen this morning like an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy. For this reason I am not sorry to find myself at the bottom of my paper, for, had I more room, perhaps I might fill it all with croaking, and make a heart ache at Eartham which I wish to be always cheerful. Adieu! My poor sympathising Mary is of course sad, but always mindful of you. CCCCLVI.-To WILLIAM HAYLEY, Esq. MY DEAR BROTHER, W. C. Oct. 18, 1793. I have not at present much that is necessary to say here, because I shall have the happiness of seeing you so soon; my time, according to custom, is a mere scrap, for which reason such must be letter also. my You will find here more than I have hitherto given you reason to expect, but none who will not be happy to see you. These, however, stay with us but a short time, and will leave us in full possession of Weston on Wednesday next. I look forward with joy to your coming, heartily wishing you a pleasant journey, in which my poor Mary joins me. Give our best love to Tom; without whom, after having been taught to look for him, we should feel our pleasure in the interview much diminished. Læti expectamus te puerumque tuum. CCCCLVII.-TO THE REV. J. JEKYLL RYE. W. C. MY DEAR SIR, Weston, Nov. 3, 1793. Sensible as I am of your kindness in taking such a journey, at no very pleasant season, merely to serve a friend of mine, I cannot allow my thanks to sleep till I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I hope never to show myself unmindful of so great a favour. Two lines which I received yesterday from Mr. Hurdis, written hastily on the day of decision, informed me that it was made in his favour, and by a majority of twenty. I have great satisfaction in the event, and consequently hold myself indebted to all who at my instance have contributed to it. You may depend on me for due attention to the honest clerk's request. When he called, it was not possible that I should answer your obliging letter, for he arrived here very early, and if I suffered any thing to interfere with my morning studies I should never accomplish my labours. Your hint concerning the subject for this year's copy is a very good one, and shall not be neglected. I remain, sincerely yours, W. C. My second visit to Weston (a scene that I cannot mention without feeling it endeared to me by the pleasures and by the pains of joyous and of mournful remembrance) took place very soon after the date of the last letter. I found Cowper apparently well, and enlivened by the society of his young kinsman from Norfolk, and another of his favourite friends, Mr. Rose. The latter came recently from the seat of Lord Spencer in Northamptonshire, and commissioned by that accomplished nobleman to invite Cowper and his guests to Althorpe, where my friend Gibbon was to make a visit of considerable continuance. All the guests of Cowper now recommended it to him very strongly to venture on this little excursion, to a house whose master he most cordially respected, and whose library alone might be regarded as a magnet of very powerful attraction to every elegant scholar. I wished to see Cowper and Gibbon personally acquainted, because I perfectly knew the real benevolence of both; for widely as they might differ on one important article, they were both able and worthy to appreciate and enjoy the extraordinary mental powers and the rare colloquial excellence of each other. But the constitutional shyness of the poet conspired with the present infirm state of Mrs. Unwin to prevent their meeting. He sent Mr. Rose and me to make his apology for declining so honourable an invitation. After a visit to Althorpe, where we had nothing to regret but the absence of Cowper, I returned to devote myself to him, when his younger guests were departed. Our social employment at this season he has very cheerfully described in the following letter to Mrs. Courtenay. CCCCLVIII.-To MRS. COURTENAY, Weston, Nov. 4, 1793. I seldom rejoice in a day of soaking rain like this, but in this, my dearest Catharina, I do rejoice sincerely, because it affords me an opportunity of writing to you, which if fair weather had invited us into the orchard walk at the usual hour I should not easily have found. I am a most busy man, busy to a degree that sometimes half distracts me; but if complete distraction be occasioned by hav ing the thoughts too much and too long attached to a single point, I am in no danger of it, with such a perpetual whirl are mine whisked about from one subject to another. When two poets meet there are fine doings I can assure you. My Homer finds work for Hayley, and his Life of Milton work for me, so that we are neither of us one moment idle. Poor Mrs. Unwin in the mean time sits quiet in her corner, occasionally laughing at us both, and not seldom interrupting us with some question or remark, for which she is constantly rewarded by me with a " Hush-hold your peace." Bless yourself, my dear Catharina, that you are not connected with a poet, especially that you have not two to deal with; ladies who have may be bidden indeed to hold their peace, but very little peace have they. How should they, in fact, have any, continually enjoined as they are to be silent. * The same fever that has been so epidemic there has been severely felt here likewise; some have died, and a multitude have been in danger. Two under our own roof have been infected with it, and I am not sure that I have perfectly escaped myself, but I am now well again. I have persuaded Hayley to stay a week longer, and again my hopes revive that he may yet have an opportunity to know my friends before he returns into Sussex. I write amidst a chaos of interruptions; Hayley on one hand spouts Greek, and on the other hand Mrs. Unwin continues talking, sometimes to us, and sometimes, because we are both too busy to attend to her, she holds a dialogue with herself.-Query, is not this a bull-and ought I not instead of dialogue to have said soliloquy? Adieu! With our united love to all your party, and with ardent wishes soon to see you all at Weston, I remain, my dearest Catherina. Cowper entreated me with great kindness to remain the whole winter at Weston, and engage with him in a regular and complete revisal of his Homer. I wanted not inclination for an offer so agreeable; but it struck me that I might render much more essential service to the poet, as I returned through London, by quickening in the minds of his more powerful friends a seasonable attention to his interest and welfare. My fears for him, in every point of view, were excited by his present very singular condition. He possessed completely at this period all the admirable faculties of his mind, and all his native tenderness of heart; but there was something indescribable in his appearance, which led me to apprehend that, without some signal event in his favour to reanimate his spirits, they would gradually sink into hopeless dejection. The state of his aged infirm companion afforded additional ground for increasing solicitude. Her cheerful and beneficent spirit could hardly resist her own accumu lated maladies, so far as to preserve ability sufficient to watch over the tender health of him whom she had watched and guarded so long. Imbecility of body and mind must gradually render this tender and heroic woman unfit for the charge which she had so laudably sustained. The signs of such imbecility were beginning to be painfully visible; nor can nature present a spectacle more truly pitiable than imbecility in such a shape, eagerly grasping for dominion, which it knows not either how to retain or how to relinquish. I left Weston in November, painfully anxious for the alarming state of my two friends, and I was so unfortunate as to add to their complicated troubles some degree of inquietude for my health. A slight attack of an epidemical fever had rather hastened than retarded my departure; but my indisposition proved more serious than I had supposed it to be; and instead of being able to execute some literary commissions for Cowper in London with the alacrity which affection suggests, I was obliged to inform him that I was confined. by illness. He wrote to me immediately, with the tenderness peculiar to himself, and my reviving health soon enabled me to enliven his apprehensive mind, not only with an account of my recovery, but with intelligence relating to his own literary engagements, that had a tendency to relieve his spirits from a considerable part of their present embarrassment and dejection. His next letter to one of his confidential friends contains a very cheerful and just description of his favourite residence. CCCCLIX.-To JOSEPH HILL, Esq. MY DEAR FRIEND, Weston, Nov. 5, 1793. In a letter from Lady Hesketh, which I received not long since, she informed me how very pleasantly she had spent some time at Wargrove. We now begin to expect her here, where our charms of situation are perhaps not equal to yours, yet by no means contemptible. She told me she had spoken to you in very handsome terms of the country round about us, but not so of our house, and the view before. The house itself, however, is not unworthy some commendation; small as it is, it is neat, and neater than she is aware of: for my study and the room over it have been repaired and beautified this summer, and little more was wanting to make it an abode sufficiently commodious for a man of my moderate desires. As to the prospect from it, that she misrepresented strangely, as I hope soon to have an opportunity to convince her by ocular demonstration. She told you, I know, of certain cottages opposite to us, or rather she described them as poor houses and hovels that effectually blind our windows. But none such exist. On the contrary, the opposite object, and the only one, is an orchard, so well planted, and the trees of such growth, that we seem to look into a wood, or rather to be surrounded by one. Thus, placed as we are in the midst of a village, we have none of those disagreeables that belong to such a position, and the village itself is one of the prettiest I know, terminated at one end by the church tower, seen through the trees, and at the other, by a very handsome gateway, opening into a fine grove of elms, belonging to our neighbour Courtenay. How happy should I be to show it instead of describing it to you! Adieu, my dear friend, CCCCLX.-TO THE REV. WALTER BAGOT. MY DEAR FRIEND, W. C. Weston, Nov. 10, 1793. You are very kind to consider my literary engagements, and to make them a reason for not interrupting me more frequently with a letter, but though I am indeed as busy as an author or an editor can well be, and am not apt to be overjoyed at the arrival of letters from uninteresting quarters, I shall always, I hope, have leisure both to peruse and to answer those of my real friends, and to do both with pleasure. I have to thank you much for your benevolent aid in the affair of my friend Hurdis. You have doubtless learned ere now that he has succeeded, and carried the prize by a majority of twenty. He is well qualified for the post he has gained. So much the better for the honour of the Oxonian laurel, and so much the more for the credit of those who have favoured him with their suffrages. I am entirely of your mind respecting this conflagration, by which all Europe suffers at present, and is likely to suffer for a long time to come. The same mistake seems to have prevailed as in the American business. We then flattered ourselves that the colonies would prove an easy conquest; and when all the neighbour nations armed themselves against France, we imagined, I believe, that she too would be presently vanquished. But we begin already to be undeceived, and God only knows to what a degree we may find we have erred at the conclusion. Such, however, is the state of things all around us, as reminds me continually of the Psalmist's expression-" He shall break them in pieces like a potter's vessel." And I rather wish than hope, in some of my melancholy moods, that England herself may escape a fracture. I remain, truly yours, CCCCLXI.-TO THE REV. MR. HURDIS. W. C. Weston, Nov. 24, 1793. MY DEAR SIR, Though my congratulations have been delayed, you have no friend, numerous as your friends are, who has more sincerely rejoiced in your success than I. It was no small mortification to me to find that three out of the six whom I had engaged were not qualified to vote. You have prevailed, however, and by a considerable majority; there is, therefore, no room left for regret. When your short note arrived, which gave me the agreeable news of your victory, our friend of Eartham was with me, and shared largely in the joy |