Henry Kirke White to John Charlesworth.

Nottingham: July 6, 1805.

Dear Charlesworth,-I beg you will admire the elegance of texture and shape of the sheet on which I have the honour to write to you, and beware lest, in drawing your conclusions, you conceive that I am turned exciseman ;-for I assure you I write altogether in character;-a poor Cambridge scholar, with a patrimony of a few old books, an ink-horn, and some sundry quires of paper, manufactured as the envelopes of pounds of tea, but converted into repositories of learning and taste.

The classics are certainly in disrepute. The ladies have no more reverence for Greek and Latin, than they have for an old peruke, or the ruffles of Queen Anne. I verily believe that they would hear Homer's Greek without evidencing one mark of terror and awe, even though spouted by an University orator, or a Westminster Stentor. O tempora! O mores! the rural elegance of the twanging French horn, and the vile squeak of the Italian fiddle are more preferred than all the energy and all the sublimity of all the Greek and Roman orators, historians, poets, and philosophers put together. Now, Sir, as a classic, I cannot bear to have the honourable fame of the ancients thus despised and contemned, and therefore I have a controversy with all the beaux and belles, Frenchmen and Italians. When they tell me that I walk by rule and compass, that I balance my body with strict regard to the centre of gravity, and that I have more Greek in my pate than grace in my limbs, I can bear it all in sullen silence, for you know it must be a libel, since I am no mathematician, and therefore cannot have learned to walk ill by system. As for grace, I do believe, since I read Xenophon, I am become a very elegant man; and in due time shall be able to spout Pindar, dancing in due gradation the advancing, retrograde, and medium steps, according to the regular progress of the strophe, antistrophe, and epode. You and I will be very fashionable men, after the manner of the Greeks we will institute an orchestra for the exercise of the ars saltandi, and will recline at our meals on the legitimate Triclinium

of the ancients, only banish all modern beaux and belles, to whom I am a professed and declared enemy.

So much for flippancy-
Vale!

H. K. WHITE.

CCLXXXVI.

In a note to a friend written six weeks before the following interesting letter, Kirke White complained that the least mental effort during the day brought on nervous horrors in the evening and a sleepless night. The systole and diastole of my heart seem to be playing at ball-the stake, my life. I can only say the game is not yet decided.' In his letters to his mother and brothers he avoided these allusions to the alarming state of his health. The following was written soon after his twenty-first birthday and six months before his death.

Henry Kirke White to P. Thompson.

Nottingham: April 8, 1806.

Dear Sir, I sincerely beg your pardon for my ungrateful disregard of your polite letter. The intervening period has been so much taken up, on the one hand by ill health, and on the other by occupations of the most indispensable kind, that I have neglected almost all my friends, and you amongst the rest. I am now at Nottingham, a truant from study, and a rejected votary at the shrine of Health; a few days will bring me back to the margin of the Cam, and bury me once more in the busy routine of college exercises. Before, however, I am again a man of bustle and occupation, I snatch a few moments to tell you how much I shall be gratified by your correspondence, and how greatly I think myself flattered by your esteeming mine worth asking for.

The little sketch of your past occupations and present pursuits interested me. Cultivate, with all assiduity, the taste for letters which you possess. It will be a source of exquisite gratification to you; and if directed as it ought to be, and I hope as it will be directed, it will be more than gratification, (if we understand pleasure alone by that word,) since it will combine with it utility of the highest kind. If polite letters were merely instrumental in cheering the hours of elegant leisure, in affording refined and

polished pleasures, uncontaminated with gross and sensual gratifications, they would still be valuable; but in a degree infinitely less than when they are considered as the hand maids of the virtues, the correctors as well as the adorners of society. But literature has, of late years, been prostituted to all the purposes of the bagnio. Poetry, in particular, arrayed in her most bewitching colours, has been taught to exercise the arts of the Leno, and to charm only that she may destroy. The Muse, who once dipped her hardy wing in the chastest dews of Castalia, and spoke nothing but what had a tendency to confirm and invigorate the manly ardour of a virtuous mind, now breathes only the voluptuous languishings of the harlot, and, like the brood of Circe, touches her charmed cords with a grace, that, while it ravishes the ear, deludes and beguiles the sense. I call to witness Mr. Moore, and the tribe of imitators which his success has called forth, that my statement is true. Lord Strangford has trodden faithfully in the steps of his pattern.

I hope for the credit of poetry, that the good sense of the age will scout this insidious school; and what may we not expect, if Moore and Lord Strangford apply themselves to a chaster Muse? They are both men of uncommon powers. You may remember the reign of Darwinian poetry, and the fopperies of Della Crusca. To these succeeded the school of Simplicity, in which Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge, are so deservedly eminent. I think that the new tribe of poets endeavour to combine these two opposite sects, and to unite richness of language, and warmth of colouring, with simplicity and pathos. They have certainly succeeded; but Moore unhappily wished to be a Catullus, and from him has sprung the licentiousness of the new school. Moore's poems and his translations will, I think, have more influence on the female society of this kingdom than the stage has had in its worst period, the reign of Charles II. Ladies are not ashamed of having the delectable Mr. Little on their toilet, which is a pretty good proof that his voluptuousness is considered as quite veiled by the sentimental garb in which it is clad. But voluptuousness is not the less dangerous for having some slight resemblance of the veil of modesty. On the contrary, her fascinations are infinitely more powerful in this retiring habit than when she boldly protrudes herself on the gazer's eye, and openly solicits his attention. The

broad indecency of Wycherly and his contemporaries was not half so dangerous as this insinuating and half-covered mock delicacy, which makes use of the blush of modesty in order to heighten the charms of vice.

I must conclude somewhat abruptly, by begging you will not punish my negligence towards you by retarding the pleasure I shall receive from your answer.

I am

Very truly yours

H. K. WHITE.

CCLXXXVII.

The great Scotch painter, although an abundant, was scarcely an easy or entertaining correspondent. But his straightforward description of his reception at Abbotsford has a charm for us which the passage of time can only intensify. It will be observed that up to this year, 1817, Scott had contrived to conceal, even from his own family, the authorship of the Waverley Novels.

Sir David Wilkie to Miss Wilkie.

Abbotsford: October 30, 1817. My dear Sister,-Since my arrival here I made a journey up the Yarrow with Mr. Scott's friend, Mr. Laidlaw, and saw the Rev. Dr. Russell, who desired most particularly to be remembered to my mother. He seemed very happy to see me, and delighted to talk over many old stories. On coming down from Yarrow I went to meet Mr. and Mrs. Scott, at the Duke of Buccleuch's at Bowhill. Mr. Scott introduced me to the Duke and his family, and as it was a day on which there was to be a great cattle-show, there was a large assemblage of people at the place and an immense number invited to dinner. The dinner was given quite in the ancient style of Border conviviality. Mr. Scott presided at a by-table in the principal room, at which the Ballantynes, Hogg the poet, and some others, besides myself, were present. This gave occasion to our being toasted as the Table of the Talents, which made some merriment. The company sat till two o'clock. There was a great variety of songs, and before parting the gentlemen were so enthusiastic with music and with claret, that the song of Weel may we a' be was sung no less than five times, and God save the King about four times in full cry. I never saw such

a flow of conviviality and high spirits, and at the same time the greatest good-humour. I have been making a little group while here of Mr. Scott, Mrs. Scott, and all the family, with Captain Ferguson, and some other characters. They are so pleased with it that it has been taken to the Duke of Buccleuch's, when a request was made that I would paint a picture of the same kind of the Duke; but as this was going out of my line entirely, I felt it necessary to decline it. I have got a good way on with the picture the Misses Scott are dressed as country girls, with pails as if they had come from milking: Mr. Scott as if telling a story: and in one corner I have put in a great dog of the Highland breed, a present to Mr. Scott from the Laird of Glengary. In the background the top of the Cowdenknowes, the Tweed, and Melrose (as seen from a hill close by) are to be introduced. I am not to bring the picture to town, as Mr. Scott wishes to show it to his mother, but he is to send it to me. I have never been in any place where there is so much real good-humour and merriment. There is nothing but amusement from morning till night; and if Mr. Scott is really writing 'Rob Roy,' it must be while we are sleeping. He is either out planting trees, superintending the masons, or erecting fences, the whole of the day. He goes frequently out hunting, and this morning there was a whole cavalcade of us out with Mr. and Miss Scott, hunting hares.

The family here are equally in the dark about whether Mr. Scott is the author of the Novels. They are quite perplexed about it they hope he is the author, and would be greatly mortified if it were to turn out that he was not. He has frequently talked about the different characters himself to us, and the young ladies express themselves greatly provoked with the sort of unconcern he affects towards them. He has denied the Novels, however, to various people that I know; and though the family used to tease him at first about them, yet they dare not do it now. D. W.

CCLXXXVIII.

We are indebted to Mr. F. W. Haydon, the son of Benjamin Robert Haydon, for the Life and Letters of his father, which were so warmly welcomed about three years ago. They offer one of the most striking illustrations in English literature of a