that contains the Savoyard curate's confession of faith, when next you come to Lichfield.

You make me long to re-examine that, for its traces are almost wholly faded away from my memory, Adieu !

LETTER LXX.

MRS COTTON.

Lichfield, June 15, 1789.

My dear Mrs C., your friend, Mr Jerningham, honours me in the poetic present he sends. It consists of his last publication, Enthusiasm, and a smaller poem which passed the press in 1786originally written in the Album, at his brother's seat in Norfolk. It contains characters of highly tinted panegyric on the present Lady Jerningham, and on his mother, the late Lady; and it breathes a tender and agreeable spirit of local partiality. This gentleman is a very pleasing writer; a feeling heart, and an elegant imagination, seem to preside, with united influence, over his pen. Hence it is, that he succeeds much best in pathetic subjects. There are fine passages in the Enthusiasm ;

but it is not so dear and interesting to me as some of his other poems.

At length our brilliant Mrs Knowles takes an house in Lombard Street again-a strange situation for such a spirit to choose, when city closeness, city noise, and city dirt are no longer to produce pecuniary advantages—but its vicinity to the counting-house in which, with all her ample fortune, she has placed her son, is the reason she alleges for this choice.

Mrs Smith's voice strengthened considerably amidst the exercise given it at the Shrewsbury, Lichfield, and Birmingham concerts. I suppose they were all, like our own, very charming—they must be when graced with two such singers as Mr Saville and his daughter. His voice is still in undiminished power. The grace and energy of his manner were not likely to suffer by the elapse of years. Mrs Smith's voice, gaining strength, is very promising; its smooth, round, and even sweetness, is confessedly unmatched even by the most celebrated of our public singers; loudness and courage are all she wants;

"All that impedes her in the golden round

Of fame, and fortune."

The gentlemen and ladies of Shrewsbury made

Mrs Smith a benefit concert in the winter. It was brilliant by their number and elegance, profitable by their generosity, and encouraging by their kindness. None can better deserve than her excellent father, and her gentle self, such liberal patronage.

Adieu, my dear friend! Yours.

LETTER LXXI.

THEOPHILUS SWIFT, Esq.

Lichfield, July 9, 1789.

DEAR Sir,-A very troublesome and alarming shortness of breath, to which the stooping posture of the writing-desk is decidedly pernicious, has induced me to delay replying to the letters of all my correspondents much longer than I wished, else had you received my earlier acknowledgments for your gay and spirited poem, The Female Parliament.

My silence was oppressive to me, when I believed you in health; but now that your duel with Colonel Lenox has thrown you on the couch of pain, though, I trust, not of danger, there is no

enduring the consciousness of any thing which may look like the coldness of neglect! This terribly fashionable arbitration of disputes!—Alas, how pregnant is it with apprehension, regret, and misery to relations and to friends!-but it is in vain to lament, to moralize upon the subject.

I have expressed to you my perfect conviction, resulting from having long considered the subject, that the exclusion of the imperfect rhyme must be an inevitable and great disadvantage to any poetic writer. You must be sensible that all our best poets, except Hayley, both of the past and the present age, retain it. The judicious, and not too licentious mixture, relieves my ear, instead of jarring upon it; producing a spirit and grandeur of sound, unknown to the unvaried and cloying sweetness of the always-perfect jingle.

You avowed yourself under the influence of a contrary prejudice, beneath which the variety and elevation of Mr Hayley's numbers have, as I at least fancy I can discern, suffered diminution. Therefore is it that I exult to find you, in this poem, getting loose from these self-imposed fetters.

It is flattering to find our sentiments upon any subject in unison with theirs whose abilities we re spect. Before I received your last, I had expressed to Miss Williams all you expressed to me concerning her poem on the Slave Trade; the

pleasure its many excellencies afforded me; its pathos; its accuracy; the high degree of genius shining out in its original and happy similies; my wonder at a choice of measure, which appeared to me the most unfavourable that could have been selected for a subject of that nature. I have heard from her since, but she takes no notice of my objection. In one respect this dear glowing daughter of Apollo is an uncomfortable correspondent. She writes to me in turn, but she does not answer my letters. I could not do thus to a friend, unless I felt a pretty sovereign contempt for their abilities and opinions.

You and I agree perfectly about the genius and grace of Helen's compositions. I forget if I ever spoke to you about Mrs C. Smith's everlasting lamentables, which she calls sonnets, made up of hackneyed scraps of dismality, with which her memory furnished her from our various poets. Never were poetical whipt syllabubs, in black glasses, so eagerly swallowed by the odd taste of the public.

I have begun Mrs Piozzi's Travels, and though not yet reached the middle of the first volume, have already met with several interesting, amusing, and ingenious observations; but I feel astonished and disgusted at the corruption of her style, loaded with idioms, and, as her Johnson used to