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the course of this disastrous war, he rose to the rank of general.

Four years after parental authority had dissolved my engagements to Colonel T- we again accidentally met in London. Imagine my feelings when he declared his unceasing affection, and told me that he had returned to England, with the hope that an acquisition to his fortune would induce my father to con sent to our union! Conceive the shame of which I became susceptible, on finding myself so much surpassed in constancy! Never had Colonel T said, either with his lip or pen, that he could not become indifferent to me. Not one of His letters had ever breathed a tenth part of the enthusiastic partiality to me of which your's is so full."

Yet ah! how humiliating was my consciousness! I could not, on the instant, explain ny sentiments; but I wrote to him the next day, confessing the change

my heart respecting himself; but I forget whether pride did, or did not, withhold the circumstance which had produced it, and the acknowledgment that had been, in my turn forsaken.

Here is a world of egotism-into which the retrospections of your letter has betrayed me. So intimately relating to him you love, perhaps it may not prove wearying.

} › REVIEW.

You say I have doubtless seen all the reviews that mention my Langollen Vale publication. No, indeed, by no means all; nor even any by voluntary inquiry. I never hunt out reviews of my own writings, nor of my favourite compositions from other pens. For mine, I desire not to trouble myself about what is just as likely to be an abuse as praise, even if I wrote as well as Gray. Just and well-discriminating criticism on poetry, is even more rare than original and beautiful poetic writing.

I know how much the decision of reviewers affects the sale of a composition; but since authors, who are above at tempting to bribe, or in any degree in fluence them, cannot help themselves, there is no good in ruminating, or ever once looking at the injustice or stupidity of spiteful or incompetent critics. have, therefore, constantly desired my friends not to obtrude any such upon any attention.

I

If my poems are of that common order which have, as Falstaff says, a natural alacrity in sinking, the praise of hireling and nameless critics would not keep MONTHLY MAG. No. 216.

them above the gulf of oblivion. If, on the contrary, they possess the buoyant property of true poetry, their fame will be established in after years, when no one will ask, What said the reviewers?

CALEB WILLIAMS.

Have you read Caleb Williams? That singular production, a novel without love, or intrigue, on the part of the three principal male characters, and without ruined castles, and haunted galleries; yet, where expectation is excited to breathless ardour, and where the terrible Graces extend their petrifying wands. The style of this extraordinary work is manly, compressed, animated, and ime pressive, in a degree which vies with that of the best writers of this period, in which prose-excellence has attained its ne plus-ultra. I am sorry to observe that the tendency, of this work is not good. We find it an indirect libel upon the laws and constitution of Great Bri tain.

LEONORA.

And have you read any of the trans lations of a short German poem, calied, William and Leonora? I hear there are several, but that the one which was shewn to me is the best, and it is printed entire in the Monthly Magazine for March last. It is the wildest and oddest of all terrible things, and has made considerable noise amongst our few poetic readers. The short, abrupt measure of the translation before mentioned, suits the rapidity of a midnight journey of a thousand miles. The German poet has given a great accession of sublimity, in spite of the vulgarness of cant phrases, used for the purpose of picturesque sound. The pale steed, on which the lover mounts with his mistress; the flying backward, to right and left of woods, rocks, mountains, plains, and towns, by the speed of the travel, and overhead the scudding back of the moon and stars; the creeping train of the swarthy funeral, chanting the death-psalm, like toads croaking from the dark and lonely moors; the transformation of the knight to a bouy and eyeless skeleton; the vanishing of the death-horse, breathing charnel fires, then thinning to smoke, and paling, and bleaching away to nothing; are grand additions to the terrific graces of the ancient song.

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lent and distinguished Mr. Wilberforce, and Mr. Wilberforce's friend, the ingenious Dean of Carlisle. It was a triumvirate of eloquence. Their different politics drew forth their mutual powers, very amicably exerted. They were in my parlour the day before I came away, from eleven till one in the morning; from six till nine in the evening. Mrs. Chil ders shared with me the whole of that mental banquet, and other company in turn dropt in. It was an attic day.

MR. (NOW LORD) ERSKINE.

Did Mr. Erskine tell you of our accidental rencounter on the Chatsworth road, half a mile from Middleton, or the morning I left the golden Crescent, through which you and I so often walked together. I believed him in that gay throng, and he thought me much farther on my way to Sheffield, which I had forsaken to visit an old servant. After staying with her an hour, my wheels were retracing their wandering course through those lanes, where rocks and cliffs, covered with dwarf-wood, rise from the curving Derwent, that foams at their base.

I said to my maid, What an elegant figure is that gentleman approaching us, who, loitering with a book, now reads and now holds the volume in a dropt hand, to contemplate the fine views on his right! There seems mind in every gesture, every step; and how like Mr. Erskine!

A few seconds converted resemblance into reality. After a mutual exclamation, the graceful being stopt the chaise, opened the door, and putting one foot on the step, poured all his eloquence upon a retrospect of the hours we had passed together at Buxton; illuminating, as he flatteringly said, one of those seldom intervals of his busy life, in which his mind was left to enjoy, undisturbed, the luxury of intellectual intercourse.

A sudden scheme of the preceding night to go to Chatsworth that day, with Mrs. and Miss Erskine, and a large party; and they being obliged to wait at Middleton for some returning horses, indaced him to beguile the hour of waiting by that ramble, which had given us such an unexpected interview.

When people have any cordiality towards each other, such interventions of chance are right pleasant. At the instant they act upon the spirits like wine; and, as time rolls on, their recollection gilds the mind, as sun-beams a placid lake.

ams.

AN OLD LOVER.

All you write on the subject of Co lonel and Mrs. is beautiful. The picture the lady draws of her husband's mind in her letter, on which you comment, is so strangely, so extravagantly, and so darkly, coloured, as to leave my experience and observation without the means of justifying it to nature and probability, by any approximation in the apparent feelings or conduct of others. It resembles nothing one knows, and nothing one has read of, except the Falkland of Caleb WillBut there was a cause which, when revealed, fully accounts for the terrible gloom and sad dereliction of his spirit; but that a disappointment in the enamoured affections, thirty-one years ago, in a man who had never, to their object, appeared a passionate lover; that it should operate, with unabating cor rosiveness, through such an iminense lapse of time! That its bitterness should have resisted the tender attentions of a wife, younger and lovelier than her whom he had lost, and indurate his feelings against the enlivening power of filial attentions, even from objects to whose welfare he was sedulously attentive! All this seemed to me so inconceivable, that I concluded Mrs. had nursed

an enthusiastic fancy, which causelessly imputed to unextinguished passion for another object, a constitutional and morbid discontent of heart and temper: but the strange manner of his attempted visit last June, vouches for the reality of this represented, this long delirium. He inquired for me at the door, and sent up his name, Lieutenant-colonel I was dressing. My man-servant brought his card up stairs. While he did that, my housekeeper, coming up the stairs from the kitchen, saw a gentleman whom she did not know, stand at the foot of the next flight of stairs, looking up them with earnest melancholy eyes. Perceiving her, he went back into the hail; and when the man brought my message to request his going into the parlour, and to say that I would be down immediately, lo! he had vanished.

I found a letter from this lady on my return from my summer's excursion, in which she thus speaks of that attempt to see me, so strangely renounced in the instant of making it.

"Of Colonel's flying visit to you in June, I knew not a syllable till I learnt it from your letter; which, on perusing, I exclaimed, good Heaven! how could

you

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you leave the place without seeing Miss
at last, since she was at home!
He replied, with much solemnity, The
momentary gratification must have been
followed by regret and pain, that would
sufficiently have punished the temerity of
attempting to see her at all. I had no
sooner entered the house, than I became
sensible of my perilous state of feeling,
and fled with precipitation."

Mrs.

laments the abortion of
this design, alleging reasons exactly si
milar to those you express, for wishing
the renewal of our acquaintance. I re-
gret it too, from a motive not acknow.
ledged by either of you, though doubt
less felt by both, viz. that it would have
proved a spell-dissolving interview. He
had then found in his Eloisa, that disen-
chanting change which St. Preux could
not find in Mrs. Wolmar. An absence
of ten and of thirty-one years, are very
different things. Small traces would
have been perceived in me of that image
so unhappily impressed on his mind, and
which yet glows in the gay bloom of
youth. If there is any reality in this de-
scribed infatuation, and Colonel
feels pain from it, why does he shun the
infallible remedy; "the sensible and
true avouch of his own eyes?"

You place the forbearing sweetness
and patience of Mrs.
's conduct
in a very bright, yet not less just point
of view. I feel such soothing uncom-
plaining endurance far above my attain-
ment in a similar situation. Yet I wish
she had abstained from partaking her
busband's infatuation, and from the
strange desire of even transcending its
excess. It is painful to know that I
have been, however innocently, the cause
of misery to an estimable couple. Next
to the desired non-existence of such in-
sane constancy, I should have wished
unconsciousness of an evil I know not
how to remove, since Colonel

rejects the remedy that must ol'iterate
the past, by enabling him to compare it
with the present. For the lady, alas!
it is much too late in life for me to meet
the enthusiasm of such boundless par
tiality.

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ship should owe nothing to illusion ; and
all is illusion in Mrs.
, respect-
She trusted the exaggerating
ing me.
portraits of infatuation, ingenuously given
to her before she married the infatuated,
and a fondness for my poetic writings has
completed her generous mania.

OPINIONS OF 1797.

Apropos of politics, in their present desperate situation, which puts them into the mouth of very babes and sucklings in state affairs. You do me but justice in acquitting my mind of the least bias towards republicanism; but Mr. Pitt has lost my long-existing confidence in his wisdom and integrity. It has vanished beneath the inad extravagance with which he has lavished the public money, seduced the bank into clandestine and ruinous traffic with the court, and outraged the constitution by loans to the Emperor, made in treacherous privacy, without the consent of parliament: loans, which can only defer, not prevent the inevitable hour of the emperor's separate peace with our enemies. How evidently to all common sense, better to England to have met the assaults of France, when they shall be turned solely against her, before her public credit had received the late fatal blight, than thus to go on purchasing present exemption (if, indeed, lavished millions can purchase it), till state-bankruptcy, and the consequently ruined fortunes of three parts of the nation, shall palsy our nerves of selfdefence, exasperate us with government, and render us desperately careless who may be our masters, or what becomes of a constitution, violated out of all its power to protect property. O! hapless England! how rapidly art thou falling from thy late high prosperity, the victim of thy credulous confidence in one proud man, whom no chastizing experience could warn from his tricking expedients, so fraught with danger to his country; and by which he buys "Short intermission, fraught with double woe!"

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Tory and Whig party. Never, it is said, was known such intellectual gladiatorship:

"So frown'd the mighty combitants, that

hell

Grew darker at their frown, so patch'd they

stood !"

worthless acquisition of modern accom plishments. I would teach them to turn, with disgust, from the perusal of frivo lous novels, not by invective, not by prohibition, but by early setting their taste above them, and this, by familiarizing their memory and mind with the two If, however, when provoked, their power all that can operate as warning and exgreat works of Richardson, which involve to crush their opponents was equal, yet a great difference in mental temperament ample; all that is elevated and beautiful remains in favour of Dr. Parr; since, in imagination, in wit, in eloquence, in when properly respected, he is kind and characteristic discrimination, and piety. sunny of spirit, and punishes not, as the Thus fortifying their understandings surly despot punished, a liberal and poand their hearts, I would disdain coer even teasing interference; lite dissent from his opinions. Then, far cion, and from the Johnsonian niggardliness of every thing that wears the slightest ap praise, where deserved, he dispenses it pearance of suspicious watchfulness. So should their home be delightful; nor bounteously; and none better know to give that praise characteristic discrimi- would an indiscriminating desire of leav nation, of which each of you have doubting it for the married state, subject them less perused many instances.

FEMALE EDUCATION.

to the danger of an unhappy marriage; while their habits of life and taste for literature, must preclude the discontents

Were I a mother, instead of adopting of celibacy, should celibacy be their lot.

Mr. Gisborne's and Mr. Wilberforce's voluminous number of penal laws for the souls of youthful females, I would substitute the following exertions. I would induce them to be religious, by applying the Christian system rather to their hopes than to their fears. I would endeavour to inspire them with an high sense of virgin honour and truth, and of the grace and beauty of rational decorum; with a terror as well as abhorrence of female libertinism, by placing before their eyes, from real life, strong instances of its misery; while, by every opportunity of judicious ridicule, I would inspire a sovereign contempt of male profligacy; of gamesters, sots, fops, and fox-hunters. Thus, instead of making myself and my daughters ridiculous, as Mr. Gisborne advises, by demanding testimonials of the moral and pious character of every man who may ask them to dance a cou ple of dances at a ball, I should depend upon their principles and good sense for despising, instead of being corrupted by improper conversation, or indecent free doin in the momentary pauses of the dance; attempts which it is in the utmost degree improbable that they should encounter, even from the most abans doned libertine. When the dance is over, by all the indispensable rules of fashionable life, every young woman takes her seat by her mother or chaperon,

I would very early introduce my daughters to the finest English writers, both in prose or verse, rather than devote all their leisure to the comparatively

OPINIONS OF 1798.

O! this horrid, this remorseless war! Infatuated ministry! who have rejected so many opportunities of terminating it, with honour and advantage to this de ceived country; on the taking of Toulon and Valenciennes; on the desertion of Prussia; on the subsidiary claims of the emperor; yet still they went on, regard. less of our exhausted wealth, of the miseries of a bleeding world; floundering deeper and deeper in defeated projects, till the olive, with all its healing blessedness, is perhaps no longer within our reach. Yet it ought to have been tried, if it could have been procured even by the sacrifice of that (no longer great) title, King of France; by the restitution of the Toulng ships, and by the cession of all our foreign conquests, whose advantages are as dust in the balance against the miseries of protracted war. Peace is worth any price to England, short of the re duction of her navy. In another twelvemonth we shall offer the recently-rejected terms, and then offer them in vain. So it has been through the whole progress of this mad contest. Nothing but the blindest prejudice can prevent the public from being universally sensible of that melancholy tuth.

WASHINGTON.

No, dear Madam, I was not, as you suppose, favoured with a letter from General Washington, expressly addressed to myself; but, a few years after peace was signed between this country and

America,

America, an officer introduced himself, commissioned from General Washington to call upon ipe, and to assure me, fron the General himself, that no circumstance of his life had been so mortifying as to be censured in the Monody on André, as the pitiless author of his igno. minious fate: that he had laboured to save him, that he requested my attention to papers on the subject, which he had sent by this officer for my perusal.

On examining them, I found they entirely acquitted the General. They filled ne with contrition for the rash injustice of my censure. With a copy of the proceedings of the court-martial that determined André's condemnation, there was a copy of a letter from General Washington to General Clinton, offering to give up André in exchange for Arnold, who had fled to the British camp, observing the reason there was to believe that the apostate general had exposed that gallant English officer to unnecessary danger to facilitate his own escape: copy of another letter from General Washington to Major André, adjuring him to state to the commander in chief his unavoidable conviction of the selfish perfidy of Arnold, in suggesting that plan of disguise, which exposed André, if taken, to certain condemnation as a spy, when, if he had come openly in his regimentals, and under a flag of truce, to the then unsuspected American general, he would have been perfectly safe: copy of Andre's high-souled answer, thanking General Washington for the interest he took in his destiny; but, observing that, even under conviction of General Arnold's inattention to his safety, he could not suggest to General Clinton any thing which might influence him to save his less important life by such an exchange,

OPINION OF 1800.

At first I hailed the revolution in France as a glorious attempt to procure for that country the blessings of a limited monarchy, but I soon saw, in the tyranny exerted towards its mild monarch, and in the interference of the neighbouring nations, that the result would prove a fatal blow to rational liberty in Europe, and most of all, in this country; that it would, as you finely express it, place British freedom upon a Darrow and wasting isthmus, between anarchy and despotism. Had this revolution happened beneath the reign of a tyrant, it night have acted upon other kingdoms with a warning influence against tyranny. As it was, our king and parliament, with

nine-tenths of the English people, impute it chiefly, and but that they choose to call in the aid of religious zeal to sup. port sanguinary measures, most opposite to the gospel precepts, they would, ex. clusively, impute the overthrow of monarchy in France to the concessions made by the king in favour of his subjects' liberties.

flence every rational and religious plan for the reformation of abuses is termed Jacobinism. Hence Mr. Pitt dared to say, in the senate, not a month ago, that to assert that the interests of the few ought to be subordinate to those of the many, was maintaining the vital principle of Jacobinism. Hence, while he and his adherents justly represent our foes as crippled in their navy, their com merce ruined, and most of their military conquests wrested from their possession, they are absurd enough to declare that there can be no security for England in a peace with France; as if that ruin to us, which, under her monarchy, and in the plenitude of her power and greatness, she could not effect, she was likely to compass in the disordered and exhausted state in which she must long remain.

France never kept peace with England when she thought it for her interest to break it; neither did this country with her! What has ever been will ever be, whether the Gallic government be republic, democratic, consular, or monarchical; but each nation stands now more in need of a long peace than after any former war, and therefore, when made, it will probably be of proportionate duration.

It is insulting nonsense to plead the vices of Buonaparte, or the instability of his power, as a reason for prolonging the miseries of war. His mortality might as rationally be pleaded. An opportunity was opened, by his late concessions, for obtaining a general pacification, and probably upon good terms for England and her allies; and the present debilitated state of France is the true security for its permanence; far greater than could result from the Bourbon family regaining that power which is now vested in the Crom well of that country.

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