months of the year in Touraine; and though I have been tempted, I consider with horror a journey of sixty leagues into the country. The princess of Beauveau, who is a most superior woman, has been absent about six weeks, and does not return till the twenty-fourth of this month. A large body of recruits will be assembled by the Fontainbleau journey; but, in order to have a thorough knowledge of this splendid country, I ought to stay till the month of January; and if I could be sure, that opposition would be as tranquil as they were last year- I think your life has been as animated, or, at least, as tumultuous; and I envy you lady Payne, &c., much more than either the primate or the chief justice. Let not the generous breast of my lady be torn by the black serpents of envy. She still possesses the first place in the sentiments of her slave: but the adventure of the fan was a mere accident, owing to lord Carmarthen. Adieu. I think you may be satisfied. I say nothing of my terrestrial affairs. EDWARD GIBBON.

Anna Seward to Thomas Christie, Esq.

July 1, 1790.

YES, my kind friend, Heaven has at length deprived me of that dear parent, to whom I was ever most tenderly attached, and whose infirmities, exciting my hourly pity, increased the pangs of final separation. It was in vain that my reason reproached the selfishness of my sorrow.

I can not receive, as my due, the praise you so lavish upon my final attentions. Too passionate was my affection to have had any merit in devoting myself to its duties. All was irresistible im

pulse. I made no sacrifices, for pleasure lost its nature and its name, when I was absent from him. 1 studied his ease and comfort, because I delighted to see him cheerful; and, when every energy of spirit had sunk in languor, to see him tranquil. It was my assiduous endeavour to guard him from every pain and every danger, because his sufferings gave me misery, and the thoughts of losing him anguish.

And thus did strong affection leave nothing to be performed by the sense of duty. I hope it would have produced the same attentions on my part; but I am not entitled to say that it would, or to accept of commendation for tenderness so involuntary.

It gives me pleasure that your prospects are so bright. A liberal and extended commerce may be as favourable to the expansion of superior abilities, as any other profession; and it is certainly a much more cheerful employment than that of medicine. The humane physician must have his quiet perpetually invaded by the sorrows of those who look anxiously up to him for relief, which no human art can, perhaps, administer.

I have uniformly beheld, with reverence and delight, the efforts of France to throw off the iron yoke of her slavery; not the less oppressive for having been bound with ribands and lilies. Ill betide the degenerate English heart, that does not wish her prosperity.

You ask me after Mrs. Cowley. I have not the pleasure of her acquaintance, but am familiar with her ingenious writings. This age has produced few better comedies than hers.

You are very good to wish to see me in London but I have no near view of going thither.

You will be sorry to hear that I have lost my health, and am oppressed with symptoms of an hereditary and dangerous disease.

Litchfield has been my home since I was seven years old-this house since I was thirteen; for I am still in the palace, and do not think of moving at present. It is certainly much too large for my wants, and for my income; yet is my attachment so strong to the scene, that I am tempted to try, if I recover, what strict economy, in other respects, will do towards enabling me to remain in a mansion, endeared to me as the tablet on which the pleasures of my youth are impressed, and the image of those that are everlastingly absent. Adieu. Yours, ANNA SEWARD.

Anna Seward to Walter Scott, Esq.

Litchfield, April 29, 1802.

ACCEPT my warmest thanks for the so far over-. paying bounty of your literary present. In speak. ing of its contents, I shall demonstrate that my sincerity may be trusted, whatever cause I may give you to distrust my judgment. In saying that you dare not hope your works will entertain me, you evince the existence of a deep preconceived distrust of the latter faculty in my mind. That distrust is not, I flatter myself, entirely founded, at least if I may so gather from the delight with which I peruse all that is yours, whether prose or verse, in these volumes.

Your dissertations place us in Scotland, in the midst of the feudal period. They throw the strongest light on a part of history indistinctly sketched, and partially mentioned by the English historians, and which, till now, has not been suf

ficiently elucidated, and rescued by those of your country from the imputed guilt of unprovoked depredation on the part of the Scots.

The old border ballads of your first volume are so far interesting as they corroborate your historic essays; so far valuable as that they form the basis of them. Poetically considered, little surely is their worth; and I must think it more to the credit of Mrs. Brown's memory than of her taste, that she could take pains to commit to remembrance, and to retain there, such a quantity of uncouth rhymes, almost totally destitute of all which gives metre a right to the name of poetry.

Poetry is like personal beauty; the homeliest and roughest language cannot conceal the first, any more than coarse and mean apparel the se cond. But grovelling colloquial phrase, in numbers inharmonious; verse that gives no picture to the reader's eye, no light to his understanding, no magnet to his affections, is, as composition, no more deserving his praise, than coarse forms and features in a beggar's raiment are worth his attention. Yet are these critics who seem to mistake the squalid dress of language for poetic excellence, provided the verse and its mean garb be

ancient.

Of that number seems Mr. Pinkerton, in some of his notes to those old Scottish ballads which he published in 1781; and the late Mr. Headley more than so seems in that collection of ancient Eng. lish ballads, which he soon after gave to the press. We find there an idiot preference of the rude, and, in itself, valueless, foundation on which Prior raised one of the loveliest poetic edifices in our language, the Henry and Emma. With equal insolence and stupidity, Mr. Headley terms it "Matt's versifica

tion Piece," extolling the imputed superiority of the worthless model. It is preferring a barber's block to the head of Antinous.

Mr. Pinkerton, in his note to the eldest Flowers of the Forest, calls it, very justly, an exquisite poetic dirge; but, unfortunately for his decisions in praise of ancient above modern Scottish verse, he adds, "The inimitable beauty of the original induced a variety of versifiers to mingle stanzas of their own composition; but it is the painful, though necessary duty of an editor, by the touch stone of truth, to discriminate such dross from the gold of antiquity ;" and, in the note to that pathe. tic and truly beautiful elegy, Lady Bothwell's Lament, he says the four stanzas he has given appear to be all that are genuine. It has since, as you observe, been proved, that both the Flodden Dirges, even as he has given them, are modern. Their beauty was a touchstone, as he expresses it, which might have shown their younger birth to any critic, whose taste had not received the broad impression of that torpedo, antiquarianism.

You, with all your strength, originality, and richness of imagination, had a slight touch of that torpedo, when you observed, that the manner of the ancient minstrels is so happily imitated in the first Flowers of the Forest, that it required the strongest positive evidence to convince you that the song was of modern date. The phraseology, indeed, is of their texture; but, comparing it with the border ballads, in your first volume, I should have pronounced it modern, from its so much more lively pictures.

Permit me, too, to confess, that I can discover very little of all which constitutes poetry in the first old tale, which you call beautiful, excepting the