Nor should it be forgotten, that Coleridge's Ode to the Departing Year is sublimer throughout than any part of Cowper's Task; that the stripling, Southey, has written an epic poem, full of strength as to idea, and grandeur as to imagery; that both those writers, in their rhyme-productions, far outshine Cowper's prosaic couplets.

When these claims are made, without mentioning the various and charming Mason, since his poetic sun was setting when Cowper's rose- when they are poized in the scale, surely you will resign your Colossal claim for the muse of Cowper, destined as she is to immortal remembrance. That destiny I asserted for her to Dr. Darwin, and Sir Brooke Boothby, ten years ago, when I heard them decide that the Task was too prosaic to survive its century, and that they could not read it through.

HERSELF.

Ah, my friend, I have a sad account to give you of my situation, and of my hopes of ever being able to accept your kind invitation to Cantley. Too much reason have I to apprehend a total loss of all ability to travel. You know that the strength of my youth was blighted by the accident which broke the patella of my right knee, though I obtained the power of walking on even ground, with out perceptible lameness; but I remained, through life, subject to the constantly impending danger of falling. Fre quent have been those falls, producing temporary pain and confinement, but generally a few days restored me to the usual level of my, at best, feeble exertion. On the 27th of last month, deceived by an imperfect moonlight, I fell with vio lence down steps into the street, after paying an evening visit. Then, alas! it was, that I so violently sprained the muscles and tendons of my, till then, uninjured left knee, as to reduce it to an equal degree of weakness with that which is broken. Unable to stand, I was car. ried by two men from my sedan to my bed; which my surgeon ordered I should not leave till the swelling and discoloration subsided. He flattered me that, since nothing was absolutely broken, a fortnight or three weeks would repair the mischief. When, at the four days expi ration, I was got up, I found I had utterly lost all power of rising from my bed, or

chair, even though a very high one, with out the assistance of two people; and also of ascending or descending stairs. Hitherto time, in whose name lavish promises were made me by the faculty, has done nothing towards the restoration of that power, though I can walk, with a servant's arm, through the range of those fortunately large and airy rooms, which are level with my bed-chamber and dres sing-room. Thus I contrive, by a quar ter of an hour at a time, to walk my al lotted two miles every day, though I have not attempted to go down stairs.

Within these last twelve years, my con stitution has struggled with various mala. dies, but under them I always hoped relief, and often, through the goodness of God, obtained it. Now a deep internal conviction of life-long imbecility sickens at my heart, and withers the energy of my mind,-while the gloom of appreuension, more than selfish, often darkens my spirit. The oldest, the most esteem. ed, the most valued of my friends, finds his long precarious health more fre quently assailed by nervous malady, be neath which his strength and cheerfulness decline. I will not apologize for this exuberance of wailful egotism, but rest it securely on your sympathy.

BLOOMFIELD.

I estimate the Farmer's Boy, as on a level with Rogers' Pleasures of Memory; and consider each as being amongst poetic compositions, what green s amongst colours; that they have not the richness of the golden yellow, the spiendour of red, the elegance of pink and azure, the spirit of scarlet, or the grandeur of purple, but are of that hue on which the eye delights to dwell, which is lively without gaiety, and serious without melancholy.

ANDRÉ.

In the first paroxysm of anguish for the fate of my beloved friend, I wrote that Monody under the belief that be was basely murdered rather than reluctantly sacrificed to the belligerent customs and laws. I have since understood the subject better. General Washington allowed his aide-de-camp to return to England after peace was established, and American independence acknow. ledged; and he commissioned him to see me, and request my attention to the papers he sent for my perusal; copies of his letters to André, and Andre's answers, in his own hand, were amongst

them. Concern, esteem, and pity, were avowed in those of the general, and warm entreaties that he would urge General Clinton, to resign Arnold in exchange for himself, as the only means to avert that sacrifice which the laws of war demanded. Mr. Andre's letters breathed a spirit of gratitude to General Washington for the interest he took in his preservation, but firmly declined the application to General Clinton. The other papers were minutes of the courtmartial, from which it appeared, that General Washington had laboured to avert the sentence against André, and to soften the circumstances of disguised dress, and of those fatal drawings of the enemies' outworks and situation, which placed him in the character of a spy rather than that of a negotiator. The general's next fruitless endeavour was to have obtained the grant of poor Andre's petition, to die a less disgraceful death. His voice, though commander of the American armies, counted but as one on the court-martial. General Washington did me the honour to charge his aide-decamp to assure me, that no circumstance of his life had given him so much pain as the necessary sacrifice of André's life, and that next to that deplored event, the censure passed upon himself in a poem which he admired, and for which he loved the author; also to express his hope, that, whenever I reprinted the Monody, a note might be added, which should tend to acquit him of that imputed inexorable and cruel severity which had doomed to ignominious death a gallant and amiable prisoner of war.

DR. DARWIN.

While he lived here he was not in the habit of throwing his imagination into his letters; they were rather hurried over as tasks than written con amore. I have often heard him say he did not possess the epistolary graces. He told me one day, when I was about six or seven-andtwenty, that he wished to write to Dr. Franklin, to compliment him upon having united modern science and philosophy; and desired I would put his thoughts into my own language. He took his pen, and, throwing on paper the heads of what he purposed saying, de sired I would give them verbal ornament, and that he would call next day for the result. He did call; and, looking over what I had written, laughingly commended the style; copied the manuscript

verbatim in my presence, directed that copy to Dr. Franklin, America, and sent it instantly to the post-office by my father's servant.

COWPER'S LETTERS.

Certainly Cowper's letters are those of a mind not ordinarily gifted; yet, if I could forget that they proceeded from a pen which had produced one great original work, they would by no means shew me an understanding responsible for such a production. For the impartially ingenious surely they do not possess the literary usefulness of Pope's letters; the wit and imagination of Gray's, the strength and humour of Dr. Johnson's, or the brilliance, the grace, the play of fancy, which, in former years, rendered your letters to me equal to the best of Madame Sevigne's, whose domestic beauties seem to me to throw those of Cowper into shade. I mean the generality of his epistles. Some few of them are very interesting egotism, for all is egotism; such of them as describe his home, his daily haunts, and the habits of his life. Neither can a feeling heart contemplate undelighted the effusions of his personal tenderness for his friends, inconsistent as they were with the apathy and neg lect towards his poetic contemporaries.

I thank you for your third volume of Cowper, which arrived the first of this month. Its contents, perused with deli berate attention, still deeper impress my conviction, that far indeed from perfect was Cowper's character, his judgment, or his epistolary style; that his character was sullied by want of charity to the failings of others, and by an unsocial exclusion of all except a few worshippers, whose attention himself and his writings wholly engrossed-his judgment perverted by jealous prejudice against the compositions of contemporary genius: his epistolary style, by a dearth of ima gination and eloquence, inconceivable to me from the pen which gave us the · Task.

REVIEWERS.

When I was at Bristol last summer, a lady said to me, "My son is of Merchaut Taylors' school. He has there a friend and schoolfellow, not yet sixteen, who has been employed by one of the review editors to write strictures for his work, on your Memoirs of Dr. Darwin." Such are often the presumptuous deciders on new publications.

OPINIONS

OPINIONS IN 1805. Peace will soon be restored to the Continent, by the utter defeat of the present coalition; but, if no repeated experience can convince this country of the fatal mischiefs of her belligerent principles, they will soon bring on the loss of Ireland, and the rapidly succeeding downfal of British independence.

The stimulant idea, which ministers have excited amongst the people, that Buonaparte is bent upon the destruction of England, appears to me a dangerous illusion. Our rulers, probably, know it to be such; and if their dread is sincere, I am afraid it will prove another instance of the truth of the adage which says,

"Fear is a bad counsellor."

I feel assured that the French emperor is only bent upon obtaining a share in the commerce of the East and West Indies; and that we ought to fulfil the treaty of Amiens, by resigning our exclu sive pretension to Malta. Concessions in those respects would, I am convinced, satisfy him; and better, surely, that we should share with France our colonial possessions, than that we become a vassal to that empire. I see no alternative, I can hear none suggested, even by the loudest clamourers for continued war. The day-spring of security will never break upon us through the sanguinary clouds raised by the breath of ministerial infatuation.

PITT.

Secure on the tap of restoring peace, and with our alliance courted by all the surrounding nations, Mr. Pitt found us, in 1784, when we resigned ourselves to his protection; and, with our revived commerce, flourishing more and inore beneath the shade of the olive. Perceiving, as he must, the blessings that peace was regaining for us, he early panted to exchange them for the curses of war, in a quarrel with Spain about a barren and useless territory. He was happily unsuccessful in that sanguinary attempt, Would to God he had been so also in the second-After obstirately persevering in unsuccessful warfare through fourteen years, he dies, and leaves us with the national debt trebled, every port in Europe shut against us, our internal trade perishing by bankrupt ejes, owing to that arrested intercourse, and the consequent impossibility of being paid by those European cities to which our merchants had sent their goods; our taxes more than trebled; our shores me

1

GEORGE 1. AND II.

REVIEWS.

When I had the highly-prized happi ness of your conversation, you expressed surprise at my owning that, except in miscellaneous collections, my courage to encounter the trouble and anxiety of renewed publication had been appalled by the injustice which authors, much my superiors, had met from the reviewers. You politely asserted that they could not injure my compositions in the opinion of the public; but indeed I knew by experience, that they can retard their sale, and what is poetic fame but the mult plication of editions?

You afterwards confessed that your desire, regularly and attentively to pe ruse Madoc, had been chilled and repressed by the hootings of those nameless critics who, like their prototypes of the feathered race, shut their eyes on the sun, and cry, there is no daylight." If they can influence Dr. Mansel, when so great a poet is their subject, well, may I be conscious of their power to blight. the less-noble fruits of my imagination.

In years long past I heard Lucy Por ter tell Dr. Johnson that she should like sometimes to purchase new publications, and ask him if she might trust the re viewers. "Infallibly, dear Lucy," he replied, "provided you buy what ther abuse, and never any thing they praise."

of her incendiary madness; ruined past all hope her allies, and drawn ten times trebled danger and difficulties upon herself. If she does not soon purchase peace, even at that unavoidably-humiliating price as to its termas, to which her own infatuation has reduced her, those miseries must be speedily her own which she felt no remorse in bringing upon other nations, against the warning voice of her great deceased patriot, in this long and disastrous war; even the giant woes of seeing our country its bloody. theatre. To bend at last beneath the omnipotence of events, and beneath the chastizement of heaven, must as certainly be national as it is individual wisdom. But what shall we do with our pride?-Sacrifice it as we did when we sought reconcilement with our invaded colonies, and be rewarded by long years of peace, and its blooming and blessed comforts.

A REPORT

UPON THE

HERCULANEUM MANUSCRIPTS,
Addressed, by Permission, to his Royal
Highness the Prince Regent,
By the REV. JOHN HAYTER, A.M.
Chaplain in Ordinary to the Prince,
And bis superintendent of those Manuscripts.

THE Curiosity of every lover of antiquities and classical literature, will necessarily be piqued and interested by the subject of this valuable work, in many respects, one of the most striking of its kind that has appeared for many years. Our readers cannot fail to be gratified with the following extracts from it.

HERCULANEUM.

The political state of Herculaneum, whether it were a settlement of Phoenicians, or of other Asiatics, cannot be traced with any exactness, or conclusive deduction, from facts and circumstances, at any epocha earlier, than that of the Roman dominion. It can only be argued presumptively from Strabo, that it might have been of the twelve cities, which formed the dynasty of the Tuscans in Campania. The opposition it made to the victorious legions of Rome, the municipal rights which it enjoyed after its subjugation, clearly indicate some prosperity, and some importance in the estimation of the conqueror.

Herculaneum is twice called Municipium, that is, in an inscription, which I MONTHLY MAG. No. 215.

There was an earthquake, Anno Christi 63, sixteen years previous to that eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Herculaneum, Anno Christi 79. Seneca declares, that in this earthquake Herculanensis oppidi pars ruit, dubièque stant etiam, quæ relicta sunt. Nonis Februarii fuit terræ motus.

In an enclosure behind the great theatre a heap of tiles, respectively numbered, together with the trunk of a marble statue, and the fragments of several columns, was excavated under the volcanic materials. Another earthquake, indeed, immediately preceded, or rather, attended, that eruption. Some houses were thrown to the ground by the severe concussion. Their ruins are partly spread upon the original soil, partly upon the pumice stones discharged from the mountain. Pliny, in his account addressed to Tacitus, says, "Præcesserat per mul-, tos dies treror terræ minus formidilosus, 4 Q

qui