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most cruel manner; and his nephew, then a youth of fourteen, intentionally murdered; they ham-stringed, and cut off his left arm, and two of the fingers on his right hand, leaving him, as they thought, lifeless.

The last mentioned Mr Ashwell, who lives the hapless wreck of negro cruelty, uniformly confirmed to me, for I have often conversed with him, all Mr Newton had told me of the generally treacherous, ungrateful, and bloody temper of the negroes. Impressed with these ideas, I was led to consider the present efforts for their enfranchisement, as fruitless and dangerous, though just and humane; that the Scriptures, which often mention slavery, bear no testimony against it as impious; that, in some countries, the subjection of beings, that form the latest link in the chain descending from human to brute animality, was an evil inevitable, as war between nations has always been found in every climate.

Beneath the force of that melancholy conviction, I avoided reading any thing upon the subject; flattering myself, that if the abolition of a traffic so lamentable could be safely effected by our legislators, they, as Englishmen and Christians, would listen to merciful remonstrance, and feel themselves impelled to abolish it.

Your letter, and the tracts which accompanied it, have changed my ideas on the subject. They have given me indignant convictions, decided principles, and better hopes that the flood-gates of this overwhelming cruelty may be let down without ruin to our national interests.

But as to your exhortation that I would write a poem on the subject, I sicken at the idea of encountering the certain pains, and uncertain pleasures of publication, by committing this theme to my muse, fruitful as it is in the great nerves of poetry, pathos, and horror; and this, because I have no confidence that her voice would arrest the general attention. Better poetry than mine, though richly the product, is not the taste of this age. Mr Day's sublime poem, The Dying Negro, past away without its fame, though eminently calculated to impress the public with horror of the slave-trade.

You gratify me much by speaking so highly of my Elegies on Cooke and André, and on Lady Millar. When the society for arts and sciences, of which my acquaintance, Sir Joseph Banks, is President, struck a meḍal in honour of Captain Cooke, Mr Green of our museum had one, and indeed every person who had interested themselves at all publicly in the memory of that philanthropic hero.

"To me alone

One of old Gideon's miracles was shown;
For upon all the quicken'd ground
The fruitful seed of Heaven did brooding lie,

And nothing but the muses fleece was dry."

Then the public hireling critics are not my friends; and I have personal enemies in some of them, rendered such by my sincerity, and because I could not stoop to flatter with praise the miserable rhymes they presented to me; and for that sin of omission to their vanity, they load my writings with imputed vulgarness, bombast, immorality, and obscenity itself, as the European Magazine and English Review testify. However contemptible such evidently groundless censure, it is not very pleasant to its object.

In losing + Mr Bently, my muse lost a friend and protector. I had not the pleasure of being known to that gentleman, when he spoke to the public in such warm praise of my writings, either personally or by letter. He fanned her fires with the breath of ingenious, generous, classical, and

* From Cowley's Ode on being refused a place at Court, with the hopes of which he had been flattered by Charles the Second, to whose interests he had devoted himself in that monarch's adversity.-S.

↑ He was reviewer in the poetic department of the Monthly Review many years.-S.

discriminating praise. I knew not, at the time, to whom I was so much obliged.

That charming writer, Miss More, has given the world a poem on the Slave Trade; so has her ungrateful pupil Lactilla. I have not yet seen either of those compositions; but I cannot prevail upon myself to give my scribbling foes new opportunity of venting their spleen, by speaking to the world of the inferiority of my attempt to that of the unlettered milk-woman's. So, I am sure, they would say, were I to write as well as Milton on the theme.

How should these reflections fail to extinguish the ardour of my exertion, when it feels inclined to struggle for an escape from common-life avocations to Aonian employments! My only stimulus, from without, to an attempt on this occasion, is the consciousness that you, and a few other ingenious friends, are predisposed in its favour. I confess that to be a powerful one. During an whole hour after I received your letter, it maintained its ground ere it sunk beneath the snow-drifts of opposing recollections.

VOL. II.

33

C

LETTER VI.

REV. T. S. WHALLEY.

Lichfield, March 1, 1788.

I REJOICE that Mont Blanc lifts its majestic head in the poetic world. Several of my * late letters have mentioned this poem, and the charitable reason for publishing it, more meritorious than the thirst of fame.

I have mentioned it also in our Lichfield circles; but while those who form them seek my society, they pay no attention either to my wishes or opinions respecting books, and often express their dislike of poetry in my presence, or parade, with their silly affectation of not understanding it; as if sense, sentiment, or description, could be obscured by the graces of measure, or the harmony of rhyme.

But, emerging from these mists of spleen rather than of ignorance, let me turn my eyes to the stupendous mountain of Savoy, which you have gilded with a light so radiant.

* The passages that announce it have been omitted in the transcript, on account of the strictures upon it in this epistle.-S.

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