I No sooner hit on any poetic plan or fancy, but I wish to send it to you; and if knowing and reading these give half the pleasure to you, that communicating them to you. gives to me, I am satisfied.

I have a poetic whim in my head, which I at present dedicate, or rather inscribe, to the right hon. C. J. Fox; but how long that fancy may hold, I cannot say. A few of the first lines I have just rough-sketched, as follows:

SKETCH.

How wisdom and folly meet, mix, and unite;

How virtue and vice blend their black and their white;
How genius, th' illustrious father of fiction,

Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction

VOL. II.

2

I sing:

I sing: If these mortals, the critics, should bustle,
I care not, not I, let the critics go whistle.

But now for a patron, whose name and whose glory At once may illustrate and honour my story.

Thou first of our orators, first of our wits;

Yet whose parts and acquirements seem mere lucky hits;
With knowledge so vast, and with judgment so strong,
No man with the half of 'em e'er went far wrong;
With passions so potent, and fancies so bright,
No man with the half of 'em e'er went quite right;

A sorry, poor misbegot son of the muses,

For using thy name offers fifty excuses.

Good L-d, what is man! for as simple he looks,
Do but try to develop his hooks and his crooks;
With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil,
All in all he's a problem must puzzle the devil.

On his one ruling passion Sir Pope hugely labours, That, like th' old Hebrew-walking switch, eats up its neighbours:

Mankind are his show box-a friend, would you know

him?

Pull the string, ruling passion the picture will shew him.

What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system,

One trifling particular, truth, should have miss'd him;
For, in spite of his fine theoretic positions,

Mankind is a science defies definitions.

Some sort all our 'qualities each to its tribe, And think human nature they truly describe;

Have you found this, or t'other? there's more in the wind,
As by one drunken fellow his comrades you'll find.
But such is the flaw, or the depth of the plan,
In the make of that wonderful creature, call'd Man,
No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same,
Though like as was ever twin brother to brother,
Possessing the one shall imply you've the other.

On the 20th current I hope to have the honour of assuring you, in

I am

person, how sincerely

* * * * *

* *

Q 2

. No.

No. LXXIII.

To MR. CUNNINGHAM.

MY DEAR SIR,

Ellisland, 4th May, 1789.

YOUR duty-free favour of the 26th April I received two days ago: I will not say I perused it with pleasure; that is the cold compliment of ceremony: I perused it, Sir, with delicious satisfaction-In short, it is such a letter, that not you, nor your friend, but the legislature, by express proviso in their postagelaws, should frank. A letter informed with the soul of friendship is such an honour to human nature, that they should order it free ingress and egress to and from their bags and mails, as an encouragement and mark of distinction to super-eminent virtue.

I have just put the last hand to a little poem which I think will be something to your taste.

One

One morning lately, as I was out pretty early in the fields sowing some grass-seeds, I heard the burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and presently a poor little wounded hare came crippling by me. You will guess my indigna

tion at the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when they all of them have young ones. Indeed there is something in that business of destroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal creation that do not injure us materially, which I could never reconcile to my ideas of virtue.

On seeing a Fellow wound a Hare with a Shot,
April, 1789.

INHUMAN man! curse on thy barb'rous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye,
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart.

Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field,
The bitter little that of life remains;

No more the thickening brakes or verdant plains,

To thee a home, or food, or pastime yield.

Seek, mangled innocent, some wonted form;
That wonted form, alas! thy dying bed,

The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head,
The cold earth with thy blood-stain'd bosom warm.

Perhaps