it is now, in consequence of his compliment, the prettiest room in Eyam. Nor has this been all; I am indebted to the care Major Wright has taken to prepare a very cordial reception for me at Hassop, for all the civilities and politeness I have received there from Mr. Eyre. My entertainments in the pleasure grounds, plantations, green-houses; and within doors with many fine paintings, and the uncommonly agreeable conversation of the owner, will not be the least pleasing circumstances of the intelligence I shall continue to send of my situation to the South of England. Mr. Eyre has given me a particular and general invitation to repeat my visits to Hassop; and he has also favoured me with some books to read. "From Captain Bourne, of Rowsley, I have experienced, if I may so call it, an exuberance of hospitality and respect; he has also lent me Burgh's Political Disquisitions. When Mr. Parr, of Stanmore, who has my Lord Dartmouth's young sons under his care, and those of several other noblemen in administration, was asked whether he had read these Disquisitions; "Have I read my Bible, Sir?' was the answer Mr. Parr gave to the question*. Captain Bourne moreover has presented me with a valuable pair of sleeve buttons, they are pebbles which he gathered himself in Martinico before that island surrendered to the English last war. Captain Bourne was then upon a reconnoitering party, and on his return had the pebbles set in gold. They are at length transferred from the torrid zone to the wrists of your humble servant; but I have had the misfortune yesterday to drop one of them in the dell that is now my favourite scene of meditation, and we have not yet recovered it. I mention these little particulars as a supplement to the other testimonies I gave you of your parishioners' affection to me; and I question not they will afford you on my account a kindred satisfaction. From the whole of my situation taken together, you may judge whether, when my parochial duties, correspondencies, and other similar employments and engagements are deducted, I have one spare moment remaining; indeed I never was less alone, or had less leisure in the whole course of my life. The new circle of connections in which my residence at Eyam has necessarily engaged me, has been a kind of vortex absorbing all remoter considerations; accordingly several of my southern friends complain heavily of my silence and apparent neglect of them. They have no real cause, for I purpose day after day to write to them, and employ my amanuensis to transcribe a variety of things to send them as a compliment of remembrance; in the mean time every succeeding day brings its full portion of employment, glides away like the last without the intended letter, and at length I find myself two, three, or four months after "Political Disquisitions, or an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses," by James Burgh, an eminent writer in his day, 3 vols. 8vo, 1774, bave the epithet of "excellent" in the Bibliotheca Parriana. wards surrounded with unanswered letters from my most respectable and worthy friends. "Very lately I received a long letter from Sir Thomas Edwards, who is just recovered from a dangerous nervous fever. Sir Thomas acquaints me he was at a rout, and was playing cards with Lady Burland when the melancholy intelligence was brought of her husband's sudden death * ; they only told her in the rooms Sir John was extremely ill. A very mournful transition indeed, from the card-table to a death-bed! Sir Thomas, Lady Edwards, and all my London and Kentish friends, those of Almondbury, and many in Scotland, are truly rejoiced with the accounts I have sent them of my Derbyshire Curacy; and I am certain many of them will entertain a better opinion of the Peak from the colours with which I have endeavoured to soften and illuminate its most rugged and savage scenes. My father and my sister, who have the least reason and excuse, are the most dilatory and negligent of all my correspondents. "Tell Miss Seward, with my respects and acknowledgments for her last favour, that the Major has made ample atonement for sacrificing some of the beauties of the dell by creating others that bid fair to prosper, and in time to afford foliage and shade ample enough to fill the ears with harmony and the imagination with the most soothing corresponding pleasures. I find it already extremely favourable to meditation and poetic dreams : and, in allusion to Petrarch's favourite retirement, have christened the whole scene of its romantic beauties by the name of Valclusa. "I have still the inexpressible satisfaction to observe your Church more crowded than I am assured it has been ever remembered during this season of the year. No more Methodist teachers appear at the Chapel at Eyam; the few that resort to them at Grindleford-bridge are such as an angel from Heaven would have no influence with; and as I suppose you do not expect me to work miracles, since nothing less will convince or convert them, they must even be left to prey upon garbage, 'and follow the wandering fires of their own vapourish imaginations.' However, we shall have no spiritual will-of-the-wisp to lead the inhabitants astray; for Justice, under the form of my good friend the Major, hath now fixed her seat among us, so you may judge whether one, who has used the sword so long and so honourably in the service of his country, is disposed to bear it in vain' in this case, so far as that of justice hath any concern in protecting the established religion of the country. The very idea of the Major's justiciary powers hath already struck a terror into some of the few 'evil doers' in this neighbourhood; and I persuade myself its influence will reach many little abuses against which a minister may argue, in his pastoral capacity, to the day of judgment in vain. ་ Sir John Burland, Knt. died at Westminster March 28, 1776. "The letter I wrote to the Archbishop of York did neither require an answer, nor did I expect one; however, a letter that I have just received informs me, that I am a favourite with the Archbishop, an honour for which I am greatly obliged to his Grace, but of which I never mean to avail myself any further. "I shall begin a narrative of my life in my next letter; in the mean time I remain with every good wish for your happiness and prosperity, dear Sir, "Your very affectionate and humble servant, "I have this moment brought to me your letter to the good and worthy Dolly. I thank you cordially for your kind remembrance in it; and you may observe I have anticipated, in the foregoing long letter, every thing you wished me to acquaint you with. I dined lately at Stoke; Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were both well, and received me and my young gentleman with their usual kindness and cordiality. Your donation of £.2. 2s. was distributed to forty-two poor persons, and came in a very seasonable time. All the persons that were relieved return their grateful thanks. "Rejoice with me, for we have just found the golden' Gage d'Amitié' that was lost. Adieu!" 5. Miss SEWARD to Mr. URBAN. "MR. URBAN, March 1785. "Your Magazine is a proper and honourable repository for every thing curious in nature, in science, and in art. Therefore I transmit to it the ensuing account of a being in whom the lustre of native genius shines through the mists which were thrown around him by obscure birth, the total absence of all refined instruction, and by the daily necessity of manual labour. "William Newton was born at Wardlow in Derbyshire, a small hamlet on Tideswell Moor, which extends along the tops of some of the Peak Mountains. This hamlet parishes to the village of Eyam, of which my father is Rector and Mr. Cunningham Curate. The inclosed specimen of William Newton's poetic talent is addressed to the last-named gentleman, whose poems are not unknown or unadmired. I give my word of honour that it has not received any correction from me. I send it in his own hand-writing. Mr. Cunningham assures me, that neither himself nor any other person has altered a single syllable of these verses; and indeed the style of their author's letters evinces that his imagination has no rude asperities which demand the critical chissel. "William Newton's father was a carpenter, too ignorant to This narrative, if ever written, is not preserved with the letters here inserted. give his son any literary advantages, and too indigent to procure them for him. A dame-school and a writing-master formed the boundaries of our Minstrel's education. He worked at his father's trade, and very early became so ingenious, skilful, and industrious as to be employed by some few genteel families of the neighbourhood. On these occasions, I have been told, he used to examine books which accident lay about in the apartments where he was at work. They awakened into sensibility and expansion the internal fires of his spirit. Every species of fine writing engaged his attention; but poetry enchanted him. From that period all the earnings of his ingenious industry, which he could prudently spare, were expended in books. "Some five years since Mr. Cunningham by accident discovered this literary flower of the desert. A retired disposition, and the most unobtrusive modesty, had cast a veil over his talents, which few had possessed sagacity to pierce, though his inventive industry had raised his reputation as a workman. He was employed, I am told, not only to execute, but to construct, machines for the Derbyshire Cotton-mills, besides being one of the head carpenters at the Duke of Devonshire's splendid buildings at Buxton. He married early in life a young woman of his own rank, and is known to make a kind husband, a tender father, and to be in all respects a just and worthy man. 'When I was at Eyam with my father in the summer of 1783, Mr. Cunningham told me, that William Newton had a considerable number of well-chosen books on poetic, historic, philosophic, and religious subjects. That gentleman introduced him to me as a Minstrel of my native mountains. This selftaught Bard is rather handsome, but aims at nothing in his appearance beyond the clean and decent. When the first embarrassments were past, produced by a conscious want of the manners of the world, he conversed with perspicuity and taste upon the authors he had read, the striking scenery of the few countries he had beheld, and the nature of his own destiny, perceptions, and acquirements. "The ease and elegance of his epistolary style are wonderful. I have extracted the following sentences from a letter of thanks which I received from him in the last autumn, upon my having presented him with the four Poems I have published, bound up together: "All that your pensive, your lonely friend can return for this unmerited kindness are the warm effusions of a grateful heart. My walk through the darkling vale of toilful life has not been through a wilderness of sweets. Your having scattered, in my solitary path, flowers of so agreeable an odour, culled from the bowers of the Muses, will lighten, in many an irksome hour, the iron weight of labour. Indeed, since I received this testimony of your amity, young Hope and Joy have aided the hands of the mechanic. Every sublime and beautiful object, which I used to view with a melancholy languor, have now acquired the most animating charms in my sight. As a warm sunbeam dispels the heavy dew, and raises the head of a drooping field-flower, so has your kind attention dispersed the clouds which were cast about me by adverse and wayward fortune. "I have lately added to my little poetical collection the works of that sublime Bard, and learned and judicious critic, Mr. Hayley; and I now live in the midst of that charming Monsaldale whose graces you have so faithfully described in the Poem which you are so good to address to me. Last week Mr. Cunningham found me in this lonely valley, surrounded by wheels, springs, and various mechanical operations. To his creative fancy they appeared as the effect of magic, and he called me Prospero *.' "To have found, in the compositions of a laborious villager, some bright sparks of native genius, amidst the dross of prosaic vulgarity, had been pleasing, though perhaps not wonderful; but the elegance and harmony of William Newton's language, both in prose and verse, are miraculous, when it is remembered that, till Mr. Cunningham kindly distinguished him, he had associated only with the unlettered and inelegant vulgar. He is now only thirty years old. "I have inclosed a little poem of my own, addressed to this creature of inspiration, chiefly because it describes Monsaldale, the loveliest among the vales of Derbyshire. If its features are not so sublime as those of Dovedale, they are more soft and smiling, and not less picturesque. Strange! that Monsaldale should seldom or ever be included in the chart laid down for the curious who mean to make the tour of that country. "If you think my rhymes worth publishing, be so good as to insert them in the same Magazine with those of the Minstrel †. 66 'Yours, &c, ANNA SEWARD." 6. As a proper continuation of the preceding narrative may be quoted the following extract from a letter of Miss SEWARD to the Lady ELEANOR BUTLER, dated Dec. 9, 1795: My Memoir of the Peak Minstrel ‡, and Poem addressed to him in the Gentleman's Magazine for March 1785, have had * This is an excellent specimen of what Miss Seward considered, "an easy and elegaŋt epistolary style!" In that lady's ideas, as appears by the next paragraph, prose and vulgarity were synonymous. The musestricken artisan deserves some credit for having so cleverly suited his patroness's taste. They are printed together; see Gent. Mag. vol. LV. p. 212. Among Miss Seward's published letters are several to Mr. W. Newton. In August 1787 she writes to Mr. Hayley: "My poetic carpenter comes to see me soon. I had the pleasure of assisting to enable him to |