announcing his fears on this subject. My answer expressed sincere and tender sympathy. It observed that, since he well knew the lively interest I had long taken in Howel's destiny, and must ever take in what so nearly concerns his own peace, I could not doubt receiving an instant line of information upon the dawn of any hope in that now dark quarter. If indeed they are now happy in a reunion, this silence is at once unkind and unfeeling, and will convince me that they did not slander the dear illustrious bard, who whispered to me that his affections were subject to ague fits. Sure I am, that I never deserved to lose one atom of that fervent friendship which Mr Hayley's letters, during the first years of our correspondence, pledged to me should be eternal. The letters with which he has honoured me, during the past three years, have had intervals of several months between their dates, are shorter and less affecionate than those which blest me in the years that are flown. Never will he find a being more devoted to his genius, more interested in his happiness, more attached to his virtues.

It is of Colonel Barry that I mean to inquire concerning the safety of Howel, since, if the person mentioned in the papers prove some other of that name, it would be tearing open the poor bard's wounds to ask the question of him.

Alas! my dear C-, the night before last my father had another dreadful seizure; and though the present danger seems past away, it has left him weaker than ever, both in body and mind. During yesterday, I could not find a moment in which to take up my pen; and my spirits were so oppressed, that if I had not wanted leisure, I should probably have wanted resolution.

Burns is honoured by your having adopted his word "chittering;" yet I know not if it is well to apply the epithet generally to so sweet a songster. Burns does not say the chittering red-breast; but he mentions the chittering wing of that little bird, when he sits forlorn on a leafless bough through a snowy night. Unwaking, for the sleep of death, is a fine epithet, which I believe have created.

you

The new poet you mention, is said to be a distinguished classic scholar. If so, he adds strength to my long conviction, that though familiarity with the Greek and Latin poets may improve a fine genius, yet that it will never enable a moderate one to write elegantly in his own language. Adieu!

LETTER XXXVII.

H. CARY, ESQ.

Lichfield, Oct. 4, 1788.

SEND me a copy of your sonnet addressed to Mr Swift, on his Temple of Folly. I want to show to one of my literary correspondents, who affects to despise that ingenious, though not faultless work, what are your sentiments of its merit:

« Their praise is fame, that makes the poet live,
Who knew themselves to win the palm they give.”

Did I conceive that I should catch myself writing an epigram, who have so little antithetical point in the constitution of my fancy? There's a word for fresh from the mint. you, discovered that I am a prodigious coiner. Alas! your hope for Howel's safety was falla

You must have

cious. Too certainly

"He floats upon his watery bier."

LETTER XXXVIII.

REV.

BERWICK.

Lichfield, Oct. 6, 1788

WITH more wit than justice, my dear Sir, does your last letter rally me upon one of the mortifying circumstances of my situation, that of being unable, through want of leisure, to cultivate frequent epistolary intercourse with my absent friends, and to form new connections of that sort with the ingenious and the amiable who honour me with their notice. Alas! when to such I am silent, it is never from indolence.

Too soon, however, does your letter grow serious, and complain of mournful devastations in the hoarded treasures of the heart. Mine has known what it is to grieve from that source of sorrow, and breathes sympathetic sighs for your loss. Three dear friends torn away in three short months!-it is a trial that bears hard upon the spirits. I hope the fourth, whom you hint as being worse than dead, has since been restored to the comforts of existence. I was glad that time

had so far healed the wounds of deprivation, that your health no longer suffered.

A more beautiful poetic image I never met than that presented in the lines you quoted on this melancholy occasion; Memory, sitting at the altar she has raised to Woe, and feeding the source of her own tears.

You inquire after my poetical sister, Mrs C. Smith. I never saw her, and know only the mere outline of her history as the wife of a profligate spendthrift, who lived near Mr Hayley in Sussex, and there dissipated his fortune. A fine woman in her person, and the mother of many children. Popular as have been her sonnets, they always appeared to me as a mere flow of melancholy and harmonious numbers, full of notorious plagiarisms, barren of original ideas and poetical imagery. You observe, that, till Mrs Smith's sonnets appeared, you had considered the sonnet as a light and trivial composition. Boileau says that "Apollo, tired with votaries who assumed the name of poet, on the slight pretence of tagging flimsy rhymes, invented the strict, the rigorous sonnet as a test of skill;"—but it was the legitimate sonnet which Boileau meant, not that facile form of verse which Mrs Smith has taken, three elegiac stanzas closing with a couplet. Petrarch's, and Milton's, and Warton's sonnets are