gratefully accept your recommendation, if a Caledonian expedition should appear in my prospects. Invalid parents fixed me, through youth, to this peculiar spot. One link of the precious chain remains yet unbroken, and grows stronger by its very weakness, than the fetters of literal imprisonment. Stationary habits will perhaps have become invincible, ere the long-dreaded hour of my infranchisement shall arrive. Adieu! LETTER II. G. HARDINGE, Esq. Lichfield, Jan. 23, 1788. I SINCERELY thank you for your criticisms upon my poem on the Future Existence of Brutes. In consequence it has undergone several little alterations; though, where I do not feel the force of your objections, the passages remain in their original state. In the 8th stanza I have substituted cruel for barbarous; but I must observe, that if the former had been used too near to have admitted a repetition, you would scarce be able to convince me, that to use barbarous synonymously, would have been a vulgarism. Barbarity signifies cruelty, full as often as it implies an uncivilized state: "Barbarian stay!—that bloody hand restrain!"- -Pope. * I cannot, in the next quatrain, learn to dislike the word steely, as applied to spurs. It is certainly of the tribe of your old aversions; but as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, were as fond as you are averse to the whole confraternity, snowy, steepy, grassy, turfy, &c. I must always dissent from an every-way impolitic desire of excluding them from the poetic page. Doubtless those great authors felt, as strongly as myself, the important power they possess of putting the sense of two or three words into one, and of increasing the general harmony by softness of termination. Dear to the poet are all the privileges which enable him to say much in little. Pity that you thus suffer prejudices to spoil, at times, such excellent critical abilities! I could easily alter the line you object to in the 10th, as obscure, Speaking of post-horses, "While smites the lash, the steely torments goad." Thus, "Beneath a load Their fainting strength is basely doom'd to bear." "Which their exhausted strength is doom'd to bear." Yet I shall not, because I like the first reading much better; that, and which, and whom, are words poets ought always, upon established privilege, to omit, wherever their omission does not produce obscurity. Every one accustomed to poetic language, and such only is it of consequence to please, will, I am sure, understand the 10th and 11th stanzas, as instantly with their ellipsis as without it. The that's, the which's, the who's, and the whom's, are prosefiers, and are always in some degree injurious to the melody of verse. Not to leave such things to be supplied by the reader's imagination is to suppose it dull indeed. Pope would have stared had a poetic reader told him, that the following couplet was obscure for want of the word whom, "O Death! all eloquent, you only prove What dust we doat on when 'tis man (whom) we love." Surely inelegance results from the insertion, not from the omission of such feeble expletives! I am glad you like my word retributory, for which I know not that I have any poetical authority. Belford says to Lovelace, in the great work of Richardson, "something strangely retributive seems going forward." I confess that the second and eighteenth stanzas are prosaic; but, in argumentative verse, the occurrence, at intervals, of unornamented diction is not censurable, provided it does not degenerate into vulgarism. Those stanzas are necessary links in the chain of my reasoning;-but I found it impossible to make them take the poetic gilding. It would jar me to part with the epithet natural for the temper of the dog. I am proud of your praise of the *twentyfourth quatrain, which is one of my greatest favourites in the poem. Stanza 25th, I think the word mark more spirited than see, and as such retain it; but I have adopted your alteration of the word fierce into savage. In the 26th, your proposal of changing the word endeared to dear, in order to avoid the * When unattach'd, and yet to man unknown, And stalks the terror of the desert groves. elision, I reject, upon the principle of preferring sense to sound. With honest joy th' endear'd commission brings. To say "With honest joy the dear commission brings," would fail to express, by reference, that sentiment of affection to his master, which endeared conveys. That which is dear may be so for itself, and, in this case, for the mere exercise it gives. That which is endeared must have been made precious by some previous consideration. You see I have changed intrusive for intrusion. Whenever the modes of expression are equal in my own choice, I respect the preference of a friend. *In the 29th, you wish the second line softened; but the harshness was purposed, as expressing fatigue by the dragging sound. I have made the slight change you suggested in the first line of the 30th; but in the following:-" Ha! does he pass the interdicted bounds!" I cannot expunge the interjection. Many, perhaps, may object to it; but there are who will think, with me, that it gives dramatic spirit to the description. * When night broods sullen o'er the drowsy earth, |