ceptive kind to recommend to you, except that you should endeavour, with him, to become one of those votaries of Contentment,

By happy alchemy of mind,

Who turn to pleasure all they find.

Green's other pieces are all worth your perusal. "The Sparrow and Diamond" is a lively picture of the struggle between avarice and tenderness in a female breast.

The Seeker," and the poem "On Barclay's Apology," may half tempt you to turn quaker, for which sect the author had a manifest partiality. The "Grotto must be at least twice read before it is fully comprehended; but it will repay that labour. It is as witty and poetical as his "Spleen," though strangely desultory.

Green ranks among the minor poets; but I confess I would sacrifice many writers of whole tomes in the collection rather than part with him.

To the triumvirate in this letter I am not tempted to make any addition; I therefore close the subject with subscribing myself

Your truly affectionate, &c.

LETTER XVIII.

HAVING thus, my dear pupil, in a method perhaps scarcely perceptible to you, but never absent from my own mind, led you through all the principal departments of poetical composition, in such manner as to afford you a comparative view of the productions of the most eminent English writers in each, I shall now, without further regard to method, point out to you some of those among the remainder who appear to me best worthy of your attention, and give you my ideas of their peculiar excellencies. Such an exercise of the judgment may spare you much fruitless and tiresome reading; for so little selection has been employed on the volumes that fill your shelves, that a considerable portion of them, though dignified with a place among those entitled "the English Poets,"

by way of distinction, are characterized only by dull mediocrity, or tasteless rant. I do not assert that they contain nothing worthy of perusal; but a great passion for poetry and abundance of leisure are requisite to compensate the labour of the search.

It would be unjust to confound with such unsuccessful votaries of the Muses, TICKELL, the friend of Addison, and, in some degree, the rival of Pope. Few poets of that age equal him in elegance of diction and melody of versification; and if he does not display powers of invention of the first class, his thoughts generally please by their justness and ingenuity. None of his pieces are void of some appropriate merit. The poem "On the Prospect of Peace" is one of the best of the political class: its adulatory strains are not trite and vulgar, but expand in an agreeable variety of imagery. The "Imitation of the Prophecy of Nereus," and the "Epistle to a Gentleman at Avignon," possess much merit as party poems; but

the union of party and poetry will probably afford you little pleasure. "Kensington Garden" is a pretty fancy-piece; not correct, indeed, in its mythology, since it blends the fiction of the fairy system with that of the heathen deities,but elegant and picturesque in its descriptions.

"Colin and Lucy" you have probably met with in song-collections, where it has a place as one of the most beautiful of modern ballads. The pathetic strain which he has there touched upon in a fictitious subject, he has pursued in reality on occasion of the death of his great friend and patron Addison. His elegiac poem on this event has perhaps no superior of its class in the language, for the justness of its sentiments, and the serious dignity of its poetry. The picture of the funeral in Westminster-abbey, the allusions to the moral and literary character of the deceased, and the strokes of feeling for personal loss, have all that stamp of truth which interests beyond the most brilliar