"To play the shapes of frolic fancy, and incessant form, But as you rejoice with them that do rejoice, do also remember to weep with them that weep, and pity your melancholy friend. No. CXLI. letter which Mr. S*** showed me. At present, my situation in life must be in a great measure stationary, at least for two or three years. The statement is thisI am on the supervisors' list; and as we come on there by precedency, in two or three years I shall be at the head of that list, and be appointed of course—then, a Friend might be of service to me in getting me into a place of the kingdom which I would like. A supervisor's income varies from about a hundred and twenty to two hundred a-year; but the business is an incessant drudgery, and would be nearly a complete bar to every species of literary pursuit. The moment I am To a Lady, in favour of a Player's Benefit. appointed supervisor in the common rou MADAM, tine, I may be nominated on the Collector's list; and this is always a business You were so very good as to promise purely of political patronage. A collecme to honour my friend with your pre-hundred a-year to near a thousand. They torship varies much from better than two sence on his benefit-night. That night is fixed for Friday first! the play a most also come forward by precedency on the interesting one! The Way to keep him. list, and have, besides a handsome income, I have the pleasure to know Mr. G. well. a life of complete leisure. A life of lite His merit as an actor is generally ac-rary leisure, with a decent competence, knowledged. He has genius and worth is the summit of my wishes. It would be which would do honour to patronage; he the prudish affectation of silly pride in is a poor and modest man: claims which me, to say that I do not need, or would from their very silence have the more not be indebted to a political friend; at forcible power on the generous heart. the same time, Sir, I by no means lay my Alas, for pity! that from the indolence of affairs before you thus, to hook my dethose who have the good things of this pendent situation on your benevolence. life in their gift, too often does brazen-If, in my progress in life, an opening fronted importunity snatch that boon, the rightful due of retiring, humble want! Of all the qualities we assign to the author and director of Nature, by far the most enviable is to be able to wipe away all tears from all eyes." O what insignificant, sordid wretches are they, however chance may have loaded them with wealth, who go to their graves, to their magnificent mausoleums, with hardly the consciousness of having made one poor honest heart happy! But I crave your pardon, Madam, I came to beg, not to preach. No. CXLII. EXTRACT OF A LETTER TO MR. 1794. I AM extremely obliged to you for your kind mention of my interests, in a should occur where the good offices of a gentleman of your public character and political consequence might bring me forward, I will petition your goodness with the same frankness and sincerity as I now do myself the honour to subscribe myself, &c. No. CXLIII. TO MRS. R***** DEAR MADAM, I MEANT to have called on you yesternight; but as I edged up to your boxdoor, the first object which greeted my view was one of those lobster-coated puppies, sitting like another dragon, guarding the Hesperian fruit. On the conditions and capitulations you so obligingly offer, I shall certainly make my weather-beaten rustic phiz a part of your box-furniture on Tuesday, when we may arrange the business of the visit. Among the profusion of idle compliments, which insidious craft, or unmeaning folly, incessantly offer at your shrine -a shrine, how far exalted above such adoration-permit me, were it but for rarity's sake, to pay you the honest tribute of a warm heart and an independent mind; and to assure you that I am, thou most amiable, and most accomplished of thy sex, with the most respectful esteem, and fervent regard, thine, &c. No. CXLIV. TO THE SAME. I WILL wait on you, my ever-valued friend, but whether in the morning I am not sure. Sunday closes a period of our cursed revenue business, and may probably keep me employed with my pen until 'noon. Fine employment for a poet's pen! There is a species of the human genus that I call the gin-horse class: what enviable dogs they are! Round, and round, and round they go-Mundell's ox, that drives his cotton-mill, is their exact prototype-without an idea or wish beyond their circle; fat, sleek, stupid, patient, quiet, and contented: while here I sit, altogether Novemberish, a d- melange of fretfulness and melancholy; not enough of the one to rouse me to passion, nor of the other to repose me in torpor; my soul flouncing and fluttering round her tenement, like a wild finch caught amid the horrors of winter, and newly thrust into a cage. Well, I am persuaded that it was of me the Hebrew sage prophesied, when he foretold-" And behold on whatsoever this man doth set his heart, it shall not prosper!" If my resentment is awakened, it is sure to be where it dare not squeak; and if No. CXLV. TO THE SAME. I HAVE this moment got the song from S***, and I am sorry to see that he has spoilt it a good deal. It shall be a lesson to me how I lend him any thing again. I have sent you Werter, truly happy to have any, the smallest opportunity of obliging you. 'Tis true, Madam, I saw you once since I was at W; and that once froze the very life-blood of my heart. Your reception of me was such, that a wretch meeting the eye of his judge, about to pronounce the sentence of death on him, could only have envied my feelings and situation. But I hate the theme, and never more shall write or speak on it. One thing I shall proudly say, that I can pay Mrs. — a higher tribute of esteem, and appreciate her amiable worth more truly, than any man whom I have seen approach her. No. CLXVI. TO THE SAME. that you had a spice of caprice in your morrow I shall have the honour of wait- Farewell thou first of friends, and most accomplished of women: even with all thy little caprices! and would have continued my criticisms; but as it seems the critic has forfeited your esteem, his strictures must lose their value. If it is true that "offences come only from the heart," before you I am guiltless. To admire, esteem, and prize you, as the most accomplished of women, and the first of friends-if these are crimes, I am the most offending thing alive. In a face where I used to meet the kind complacency of friendly confidence, now to find cold neglect and contemptuous scorn -is a wrench that my heart can ill bear. It is, however, some kind of miserable good luck, that while de haut-en-bas rigour may depress an unoffending wretch to the ground, it has a tendency to rouse a stubborn something in his bosom, which, though it cannot heal the wounds of his soul, is at least an opiate to blunt their poignancy. With the profoundest respect for your abilities; the most sincere esteem and ardent regard for your gentle heart and amiable manners; and the most fervent wish and prayer for your welfare, peace, and bliss, I have the honour to be, Madam, your most devoted, humble servant. No. CXLVIII. TO JOHN SYME, ESQ. You know that, among other high dignities, you have the honour to be my supreme court of critical judicature, from which there is no appeal. I enclose you a song which I composed since I saw you, and I am going to give you the history of it. Do you know, that among much that I admire in the characters and manners of those great folks whom I have now the honour to call my acquaintances, the O***** family, there is nothing charms me more than Mr. O's. unconcealable attachment to that incomparable woman. Did you ever, my dear Syme, meet with a man who owed more to the Divine Giver of all good things than Mr. O. A fine fortune, a pleasing exterior, self-evident amiable dispositions, and an ingenuous upright mind, and that informed too, much beyond the usual run of young felows of his rank and fortune: and to all this, such a woman!-but of her I shall say nothing at all, in despair of saying any thing adequate. In my song, I have endeavoured to do justice to what would be his feelings, on seeing, in the scene I have drawn, the habitation of his Lucy. As I am a good deal pleased with my performance, I in my first fervour, thought of sending it to Mrs. O—; but on second thoughts, perhaps what I offer as the honest incense of genuine respect, might, from the well-known character of poverty and poetry, be construed into some modification or other of that servility which my soul abhors.* Nothing short of a kind of absolute necessity could have made me trouble you just esteem for your sense, taste, and with this letter. Except my ardent and worth, every sentiment arising in my breast, as I put pen to paper to you, is painful. The scenes I have passed with the friend of my soul and his amiable connexions! the wrench at my heart to think that he is gone, for ever gone from me, never more to meet in the wanderings of a weary world! and the cutting reflection of all that I had most unfortunately, though most undeservedly, lost the confidence of that soul of worth, ere it took its flight! These, Madam, are sensations of no ordinary anguish. However, you also may be offended with some imputed improprieties of mine; sensibility you know I possess, and sincerity none will deny mate the fatuity of giddy caprice, or ward off the unthinking mischief of precipitate folly? frame were ab origine, blasted with a deep incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my existence. Of late, a number of domestic vexations, and some pecuniary share in the ruin of these *** were yet what I could ill bear, have so irritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied by a roprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms it to perdition. 1 have a favour to request of you, Madam; and of your sister Mrs., through** times; losses which, though trifling, your means. You know that, at the wish of my late friend, I made a collection of all my trifles in verse which I had ever written. There are many of them local, some of them puerile and silly, and all of them, unfit for the public eye. As I have some little fame at stake, a fame that I trust may live when the hate of those "who watch for my halting," and the contumelious sneer of those whom accident has made my superiors, will, with themselves, be gone to the regions of oblivion; I am uneasy now for the fate of those manuscripts.-Will Mrs. have the goodness to destroy them, or return them to me? As a pledge of friendship they were bestowed; and that circumstance indeed was all their merit. Most unhappily for me, that merit they no longer possess; and I hope that Mrs. -'s goodness, which I well know, and ever will revere, will not refuse this favour to a man whom she once held in some degree of estimation. Are you deep in the language of consolation? I have exhausted in reflection every topic of comfort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the Gospel: he might melt and mould the hearts of those around him, but his own kept its native incorrigibility. Still there are two great pillars that bear us up, amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The ONE is composed of the different modifications of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity. The OTHER is made up of those feelings and sentiments, which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast With the sincerest esteem, I have the disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, honour to be, Madam, &c. original and component parts of the human soul: those senses of the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities-an all-powerful, and equally beneficent God; and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field :-the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure. I do not remember, my dear Cunningham, that you and I ever talked on the subject of religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of the crafty FEw, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most as an uncertain obscurity, which mankind can never know any thing of, and with which they are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarrel with a man for his irreligion any more than I would for his want of a musical ear. I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to others, were such superlative sources of enjoyment. It is in this point of view, and for this reason, that I will deeply imbue the mind of every child of mine with religion. If my son should happen to be a man of feeling, tortures of this infernal confine for the sentiment, and taste, I shall thus add space of ninety-nine years, eleven months, largely to his enjoyments. Let me flatter and twenty-nine days, and all on account myself that this sweet little fellow, who of the impropriety of my conduct yesteris just now running about my desk, will night under your roof. Here am I, laid be a man of a melting, ardent, glowing on a bed, of pitiless furze, with my aching heart; and an imagination, delighted with head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing the painter, and rapt with the poet. Let thorn; while an infernal tormentor, wrinkme figure him wandering out in a sweet led, and old, and cruel, his name I think evening, to inhale the balmy gales, and en-is Recollection, with a whip of scorpions, joy the growing luxuriance of the spring! himself the while in the blooming youth of life. He looks abroad on all nature, and through nature up to nature's God. His soul, by swift delighting degrees, is rapt above this sublunary sphere, until he can be silent no longer, and bursts out into the glorious enthusiasm of Thomson, "These, as they change, Almighty Father, these forbids peace or rest to approach me, and keeps anguish eternally awake. Still, Madam, if I could in any measure be reinstated in the good opinion of the fair circle whom my conduct last night so much injured, I think it would be an alleviation to my torments. For this reason I trouble you with this letter. To the men of the company I will make no apology. Your husband, who insisted on my drinking more than I chose, has no right to blame me; and the other gentlemen were partakers of my guilt. But to you, And so on in all the spirit and ardour Madam, I have much to apologize. Your of that charming hymn. These are no ideal pleasures; they are real delights and I ask what of the delights among the sons of men are superior, not to say equal, to them? And they have this precious, vast addition, that conscious virtue stamps them for her own; and lays hold on them to bring herself into the presence of a witnessing, judging, and approving God. No. CLI. TO MRS. R****. good opinion I valued as one of the greatest acquisitions I had made on earth, and I was truly a beast to forfeit it. There was a Miss I, too, a woman of fine sense, gentle and unassuming mannersdo make, on my part, a miserable d—d wretch's best apology to her. A Mrs. G a charming woman, did me the honour to be prejudiced in my favour;this makes me hope that I have not outraged her beyond all forgiveness.—To all the other ladies please present my humblest contrition for my conduct, and my petition for their gracious pardon. O, all ye powers of decency and decorum! whisper to them, that my errors, though great, were involuntary- that an intoxicated man is the vilest of beasts-that it was not my nature to be brutal to any one -that to be rude to a woman, when in my senses, was impossible with me Supposes himself to be writing from the but- |