bols best with Dr Taylor's great bull, a sort of cousin-german of his in strength and surliness. His playfulness wants the elegance, his wit the brilliance, and his style the polished ease of Gray's Letters; which, as letters, are very superior indeed to Johnson's, though he pronounces them a dull work; but that was from envy. . Your epistles in this collection outshine your preceptor's, and are the gems of the volume. A transcendence só decided, must surely oblige the English to imitate the justice of the Theban literati, and, in this mutual display of epistolary powers, decree that palm to you which crowned the lyre of Corinna in her contest with Pindar. ""Tis hard to cull Yet I think my first favourite is your letter to a bridegroom. It is of twin-excellence to that celebrated one of St Evremond's to a young and lovely married woman, who wished to preserve her amorous empire. Johnson, as a writer, is most himself in his letters from Scotland. We are delighted to observe him familiarly sketching out those scenes, of which his Tour presents so sublime a picture. Mr Boswell will be gratified to find here, in Dr Johnson's approbation of his anecdotes, a full acquittal of his imputed treachery to the confidence and fame of his friend. Those who brought that accusation against Mr Boswell, evinced that they little understood Johnson's character. He said nothing to any one in confidence. Far from wishing to hide, he gloried in his malignity, and in the trust that it would be recorded. He had none of those "compunctious visitings of nature," which make softer dispositions scrupulous of wounding the feelings of others. I have heard him say, that distinguished people know that their colloquial opinions will be recorded, and their letters published. Your translation of his Latin verses to Dr Laurence forms an elegant poem, and the joint translations from Boethius have accuracy and spirit. Miss Weston told me you asked her if certain verses, signed Anna Matilda, were mine. Not they indeed ;-nor know I any thing of their origin, except from internal evidence; but it is so strong, as to be entirely conclusive with me, that the Della Cruscas, and the congenial rants which pretend to reply to them, are from the same pen, whoever Mr Merry may persuade to mother them. No two writers could have such entirely similar extravagancies in their compositions. The only verses I remember to have printed without my name were an epigram on the abusive critics of Mr Hayley's writings, and a little poem to Mason, in the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1784; reproaching him for his silence over Johnson's malignant injustice to the greatest lyric poet the world ever produced, not excepting Pindar himself; that poet his departed friend. I should suppose Pindar could not, and our scholars confess to me he did not, excel Gray in the sublimity of his imagery, or in the grandeur and variety of his numbers; and our translations of Pindar show me that the Greek poet's subjects were less elevated, less interesting. Nothing is less to be trusted than the fidelity of Doctor Johnson's pen, when he aims to be characteristic. How different from what she really was must posterity conceive of his daughterin-law, Lucy Porter, from the following sentence in these letters: "Miss Lucy has raised my esteem by many excellencies, very noble and resplendent, though a little discoloured by hoary virginity." Ill did those elevated appellations suit her downright honesty, seldom if ever expanding into generosity;-her illiterate shrewdness, and cherished vulgarism. Hoary virginity may justly be said to discolour personal graces; but those she never possessed beyond the result of a round face, with tolerably pretty features, though in the shadeless blankness of flaxen hair and eye-brows, -and a clean fair skin. These, I am told, were the sum total of her charms in the years of bloom, and that her figure had never any elegance. If beauty of face, and grace of form, had ever been hers, they are not properties to raise esteem, while, over the splendour and nobleness of intellectual qualities, the hoary virginity of fifty-two could not well have cast any dimness, I have a consciousness of obligation to you, my dear Madam, on the ground of this publication, besides the kindness, which makes it a token of your amity. I always visited, and received visits from Doctor Johnson, on every residence of his in our town, excepting only the few days in which you were here with him. A shyness between Mrs Lucy Porter and myself, the only estrangement that ever happened between us, and which had no continuance, unfortunately for me, existed at that period, depriving me of the desired pleasure of waiting upon you. Greatly as I admired Johnson's talents, and revered his knowledge, and formidable as I felt the powers to be of his witty sophistry, yet did a certain quickness of spirit, and zeal for the reputation of my favourite authors, irresistibly urge me to defend them against his spleenful injustice : - a temerity, which I was well aware made him dislike me, notwithstanding the coaxing regard he always expressed for me on his first salutations on returning to Lichfield. The breath of opposition soon used to collect the dark clouds on his horizon, "Who sat to give his little senate laws." Since I see so many Lichfield people mentioned in these letters, whose visits were not much more frequent than mine, and whose talents had no sort of claim to lettered attention, there can be no great vanity in believing that he would not pass me over in total silence. Therefore is it that I thank you for your suppressions. I must have been pained by the consciousness of going down to posterity with the envenomed arrows of Johnson's malevolence sticking about me; though I am well aware, from the recording spirit of his less benevolent biographers, that it is the fate of numbers to bear them, whose virtues and abilities are superior to mine. I cannot imagine what anonymous poem it could be, which it appears, from these letters, that he was solicited to read on one of his visits to Lichfield in 1781. Not a creature among the number of his visitors, whom he mentions, are |