So now rejoice with good Bishop Percy, for lo! his enemy is no more! He died acknowledging the manuscript. This was as it should be-non licet ἄπο νεκρῶν φορολογεῖν—he paid his due tribute when alive. Peace to his ashes! After all his hobby horse was not a colt;" yet he was a "racker of orthography," and we have the highest authority for saying that, "that insinuateth me of insanie."

P. 150. Bp. Percy writes

"Of Phillips's intended publication of the Duchess of Somerset's Letters + I know nothing; and certainly should be very unwilling to entrust to him any productions of that most amiable lady, the mother of my late excellent patroness the Duchess of Northumberland. In your Life of Shenstone you have rightly characterised her, as a lady distinguished for her exalted piety, as well as every other accomplishment,' p. 587. What, then, will be your sensations to see attributed to this faultless character the lascivious verses usually ascribed to Lady M. W.

Montagu in Dodsley's Miscellanies, beginning

'Dear Colin, prevent my warm blushes, &c.' in the late publication of this Lady's Letters by J. Dallaway, see vol. v. p. 193 ? Lady Mary, in one of her letters to her daughter Lady Bute, has very allowably vindicated herself from the imputation of having written those indecent verses; but, as she does not herself name the authoress, what can be said for this Dallaway thus taking upon him to attribute them to our Lady Hertford? of which, at best, he

The term the good Bishop generally gives on mentioning Ritson is "that wretched man." He says, "I have had some curious memoirs of Ritson, from a gentleman of Gray's Inn, with a minute account of the termination of his miserable life. In his last frenzy he was near setting fire to the building, by burning his papers, particularly an unfinished attempt to prove our blessed Saviour an impostor. All this I received from Mr. Selby, who is himself a bencher of Gray's Inn." Vid. p. 139. Dr. Anderson adds, "Mr. Selby's account of Ritson's miserable end mentions but a small part of the shocking circumstances known concerning him." p. 142.—Rev.

The correspondence of Lady Hertford (Duchess of Somerset) and her friend Lady Pomfret was published in 3 vols. and is worth one perusal. Of Lady Pomfret's singularities we could tell many most amusing anecdotes. She appears occasionally in Horace Walpole's Correspondence. Mr. Jesse and myself went last summer to see Lady Hertford's seat at Riskins, near Colnbrook, whence her letters are dated, and where she used to receive most of the poets of the day. The present house has been built since her time; but there is still in the grounds the first serpentine canal that was ever formed, which was thought a bold experiment at the time.-REV.

See Dodsley's Miscellanies, vol. vi. p. 230, where the lines are given, "Lady Mary W. -. to Sir William Y-." Surely they cannot, in propriety of speech, be called lascivious or indecent; though Sir W. Young seems to have understood what they meant. They are no doubt by Lady Mary, and in our copy of Dodsley, Horace Walpole has written her name at length.-REV.

could have had no other information than by very remote report, for the verses must have been written before he was born, and he could not have made an application of them to any one with less credibility, from the uniform tenor of that lady's life and character; besides, I do not remember that she ever wrote any verses at all,

though her epistolary compositions are of the first-rate merit. This posthumous attempt to asperse her fame, till now of the most unsullied purity, at the distance of more than half a century, cannot be too severely reprobated; and I hope you will not let it pass uncensured in your next edition of Shenstone's Life," &c.

P. 151. There is an interesting, and, as it was from his friend Dr. Percy, an authentic account of Shenstone, a name ever to be honoured by the lovers of poetry and the admirers of nature. The Schoolmistress is a poem that has never been excelled in its kind; and the Leasowes, though neglected, and despoiled of much of their ornamental beauty, still show the genius and taste with which they were originally designed. We visited it about two years since, and the impression it left on us was, that the spot was judiciously selected, suitable to the cultivated taste of the age, when no bolder footstep had penetrated into the remoter recesses, the pathless wilds, the aẞarov eonuar, of nature, which they have since done; we saw and acknowledged that it contained elements of considerable beauty, and that in one respect, from the growth of the trees, it must have been improved since Shenstone's time. The little slender streamlet still trickles down the grassy slope, but the Naiad is not there to guard it; the elm groves still spread their broad luxuriance of growth, but no poet reclines under their shade; and the vacant grots have long ceased to listen to the voice of the departed muse. But let us attend to Dr. Percy :

"Johnson had committed great mistakes with respect to Shenstone, which you have very properly rectified on the authority of Graves. He grossly misrepresented both his circumstances and his house, which was small, but elegant, and displayed a great deal of taste in the alteration and accommodation of the apartments, &c. On his sideboard he had a neat marble cistern, which, by turning a cock, was fed with living water; and be had many other little elegant contrivances, which displayed his genius, and made me regret that this little Temple of the Muses was pulled down for the larger building of Mr. Horne. This you may, if you please, mention in your new edition. That Johnson should have no conception of the value or merit of what is now called pic. turesque gardening, we cannot wonder, as he was so extremely short-sighted that he never saw a rural landscape in his life; and in his travels through Scotland pronounces that one mountain must be like.

another. But you have sufficiently cor rected his mistake on this subject. Among Shenstone's 'Levities and Songs' are many which he himself sorely regretted to me had ever been committed to the press. But, when Dodsley was printing that volume of his Miscellanies in which they first appeared, Mr. Shenstone lay ill of a fever, and, being unable to make any selection, ordered his whole portfolio to be sent to him, relying on his care to make a proper choice of what were fit to be published; but he obtruded the whole into his volume, and afterwards used that as a plea for inserting them in his works. But in the value of purchase, how much Mr. Shenstone's estate was improved by his taste will be judged from the price it fetched when sold by auction in 1795, being 17,000l. sterling, though when it descended to him it was only valued at 300l. a-year. This, I think, will deserve mention."

* We possess a copy of Hauptman's edition of Æsop, 1741, with this inscription on the blank page or fly-leaf, in Shenstone's writing,

Robertus Dodsley

Gulielmo Shenstone,
Aug. 31, 1759,

Ex rure nostro adhuc florescente
Demigrans legavit.

At this time, October 1759,

Letters, xcvii. p. 293.-REV.

Dodsley was publishing his Fables. See Shenstone's

P. 175. Those who have fortunately been, as we have, guests at the romantic and beautiful Hafod, then the abode of hospitality and literature, will forgive us for quoting from the letters of Anderson the fatal account of its destruction.

"The uncertainty of earthly happiness has lately been sadly exemplified at Hafod, the elegant and classical mansion of my worthy friend Mr. Johnes. In three short hours an accidental fire* completed the destruction of the house, the pride and ornament of the principality, and destroyed the labours and collections of nearly thirty years. Among the irreparable losses are the papers and drawings which he had arranged for the printing of the supple. mentary volume of Froissart. These he regrets most exceedingly. Fortunately the Pisaro library, which he had lately purchased, had not arrived. He is insured; but should the offices pay the whole, it would not cover half his losses. his misfortune with the greatest fortitude. 'I am stunned,' he says, in a letter to me from the Devil's Bridge, but not knocked down.' He is now in London with his family, at the house of his friend Mr. Smith, Bloomsbury-square. This morning I received the present of his Joinville,' in two 4to volumes, with plates. The Travels,' he informs me, are nearly printed, and Monstrelet' more than half

He bears

translated. His future plans are uncertain. This is a melancholy subject, which your Lordship will forgive me for dwelling upon."

P. 182. "Among our late publications Lord Woodhouselee's Life of Kamest is the most considerable. The worthy author appears everywhere the friend of religion and the advocate of civil and ecclesiastical establishments; but he has failed in exhibiting the prominent features of Kames, and is not thought to have executed his task, as a metaphysician, a philosopher, and a lawyer, with sufficient ability and success. My friend Mr. Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, a neighbour of Kames in the country, informs me that he furnished Lord Woodhouselee with copious extracts from his own biography of that singular man, with anecdotes of judges and lawyers, which his lordship acknowledges publicly, and yet every thing has been so distorted and misrepresented that he is ashamed, and has written to him to suppress his name as an authority in the second edition of his book."

P. 198. We next meet with some of the news of the day, qualified we think by a feeling of what would be acceptable to the Bishop.

The fire which destroyed Hafod, and all its gems, its splendid library, conservatory, pictures, &c. was occasioned by a maid servant setting a warming-pan on the boards of the landing of a staircase. The summer was in its glory when we were there, for the sun was rejoicing in his strength, the woods spreading the richest depth of shade, and the stream that came leaping from the hills glittered like a diamond, as it was seen from the mouth of a rocky cavern falling into the gulf below. The library was a large circular room, with a gallery opening into a lofty conservatory, at the end of which a fountain poured into a marble basin placed to receive its waters. There sat the kind, liberal, and delighted translator of Froissart in his morning gown and green velvet cap, reading to us pages of his romantic histories; and the heat of the afternoon we allayed by copious libations of old Hock and Seltzer water, listening with pleasure to his account of the creation of this secluded paradise out of what he had found a dark and sterile wild. Near two millions of trees which he planted bore witness at once to the grandeur of his plans and his attachment to his beloved retreat. -Rev.

Of such a man, of acquirements and talents so various as those of Lord Kames, it would be impossible to speak in adequate terms in a note. We beg to refer to Forbes's Life of Beattie, vol. ii. p. 293, and to D. Stewart's Life of Reid, p. cxli. The reader may also consult Warburton's Works, vol. i. p. 157, by Hurd. Dr. Parr used to say that the classical translations in the Elements of Criticism were furnished to Lord Kames by a French abbé; but with what accuracy of assertion we do not know. We, however, believe that Lord Kames did not understand Greek. Priestley, in his Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, borrowed most of his quotations from the works of Lord Kames. See his Preface, p. iii. Voltaire gave him a slap of the face, as in one of his romances,-" Ensuite on tomba rudement sur un Ecossais (Lord Kames) que s'est avis de donner des regles de goût, et de critiquer les plus admirables endroits de Racine, sans savoir le Français,”—REV.

P. 218. A month, a little month, elapses, and the Doctor changes his style.

* "The verses were sent by a correspondent who signs M. C. S. and there said to be written by Miss Seward; but it does not appear the verses were sent to the Magazine by Miss Seward herself."-Note. See on this subject Richardson's Literary Leaves, vol. ii. p. 85, and Physic and Physicians (Darwin), vol. ii. pp. 246-250.-REV.

See some judicious observations on Glover's Leonidas by Mrs. Nelson Coleridge, in her learned and interesting edition of her father's Life, vol. ii. p. 234.-We may here observe, that at p. 371 of that work, where it is said “a few first rates of Raphael and Titian are at Oakover,"—it is not so. There is a picture said to be by Raphael, but more like Giulio Romano, assuredly not Raphael. We recollect no Titian, but there are two Vanderveldes. The house will be celebrated as the residence of the author of Tremaine.-REV.

English, Scotish, and Irish; the last rather incorrectly, as the Irish regiments

are more in name than in reality... The whole is heavy, flat, and unimpressive."

In p. 220 is an interesting letter from the poet Shenstone, not to be found in his works, touching on the poets of the day, and shewing that he was expressing himself on a subject that he had studied with attention, as well as practised with success.

"It seems (he says) to be a very favourable era for the appearance of such irregular poetry (he is speaking of the Erse Fragments). The taste of the age, so far as it regards plan and style, seems to have been carried to its utmost height, as may appear in the works of Akenside,

Gray's Odes and Churchyard Verses, and
Mason's Monody and Elfrida. The
public has seen all that art can do, and
they want the more striking efforts of
wild, original, enthusiastic genius. It
seems to exclaim aloud, with the chorus
in Julius Cæsar,

Oh rather than be slaves to these deep learned men,
Give us our wildness and our woods, our huts and caves again.

I know not how far you will allow the
distinction or the principle on which I
build my remark, namely, that the taste
of the present age is somewhat higher
than its genius. This turn, you see,
favours the work the translator has to
publish, or has published already. Here
is indeed, pure original genius! the very

quintessence of poetry; a few drops of which, properly managed, are enough to give a flavour to quart bottles. And yet one or two of these pieces (the first, for instance, together with the second,) are undoubtedly as well planned as any ode we find in Horace."

We have next an account of the projected publication of the "Reliques," a work that did more than any other to revive a pure and natural taste in poetry, and which was arranged and edited with admirable judgment and knowledge. It has had many followers of more or less value, but none have equalled it in the admirable choice and elegant variety of its subjects; and it has received from the hand of the first poet of the present age that deliberate praise which arises from a knowledge of its advantageous effect on his own poetical conceptions and practice. Shenstone asks his friend if he has any Scotch ballads which he would wish preserved in a neat edition.

"I have occasioned (he writes) a friend of mine to publish a fair collection of the best old English and Scotch ballads, a work I have long had much at heart. Mr. Percy, the collector and publisher, is a man of learning, taste, and indefatigable industry; is chaplain to the Earl of Sussex. It so happens that he has himself a folio collection of this kind of MSS. which has many things truly curious, and from which he selects the best. I am only afraid that his fondness for antiquity should tempt him to admit pieces that have no other sort of merit. However, he has offered me a rejecting power, of which I mean to make considerable use. He is encouraged in his undertaking by Samuel Johnson, Garrick, and many persons of note, who lend him such assistance as is within their power. He has brought Mr. Warton (the poetry profes

sor), to ransack the Oxford libraries; and has resided (?) and employed six amanuenses to transcribe from Pepys's Collection at Cambridge, consisting of five volumes of old ballads, in folio. He says justly, that it is in the remote parts of the kingdom that he has most reason to expect the curiosities he wants; that in the southern parts fashion and novelty cause such things to be neglected. Accordingly he has settled a correspondence in Wales, in the wilds of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, in the West Indies, in Ireland, and, if he can obtain your assistance, hopes to draw materials from the whole British empire. He tells me there is in the Collection of Magdalen College library a very curious collection of ancient Scottish songs and poems, he thinks not published or known; many of Dunbar, Maitland of Lethington, and one allegorical poem of

*These have since been published by Mr. Pinkerton in his Ancient Scottish Poems, vols. 1786.-Rev.