act differently toward me for the future, I will pardon the past, and she may gather from my clemency shewn to you, some hopes, on the same conditions, of similar clemency to herself.

LETTER XCIII.

To Mrs. THROCKMORTON.

W. C.

The Lodge, March 21, 1790.

MY DEAREST MADAM,

I shall only observe on the

subject of your absence, that you have stretched it since you went, and have made it a week longer. Weston is sadly unked without you; and here are two of us, who will be heartily glad to see you again. I believe you are happier at home than any where, which is a comfortable belief to your neighbours, because it affords assurance, that since you are neither likely to ramble for pleasure, nor to meet with any avocations of business, while Weston shall continue to be your home, it will not often want you.

The two first books of my Iliad have been sub

mitted to the inspection and scrutiny of a great critic of your sex, at the instance of my Cousin, as you may suppose. The lady is mistress of more tongues than a few; (it is to be hoped she is single) and particularly she is mistress of the Greek. She returned them with expressions, that if any thing could make a poet prouder than all poets naturally are, would have made me so. I tell you this, because I I know that you all interest yourselves in the success of the said Iliad.

My periwig is arrived, and is the very perfection of all periwigs, having only one fault; which is, that my head will only go into the first half of it, the other half, or the upper part of it, continuing still unoccupied. My artist in this way at Olney has however undertaken to make the whole of it tenantable, and then I shall be twenty years younger you have ever seen me.

than

I heard of your birth-day very early in the morning; the news came from the steeple.

W. C.

LETTER XCIV.

To Lady HESKETH.

The Lodge, March 22, 1790.

I rejoice, my dearest

Cousin, that my MSS. have roamed the earth so successfully, and have met with no disaster. The single book excepted, that went to the bottom of the Thames, and rose again, they have been fortunate without exception. I am not superstitious, but have nevertheless as good a right to believe that adventure an omen, and a favourable one, as Swift had to interpret, as he did, the loss of a fine fish, which he had no sooner laid on the bank, than it flounced into the water again. This, he tells us himself, he always considered as a type of his future disappointments; and why may not I as well consider the marvellous recovery of my lost book from the bottom of the Thames, as typical of its future prosperity? To say the truth, I have no fears now about the success of my Translation, though in time past I have had many. I knew there was a style somewhere, could I but find it, in which Homer ought to be rendered, and which alone would

suit him. Long time I blundered about it, ere I could attain to any decided judgment on the matter; at first I was betrayed by a desire of accommodating my language to the simplicity of his, into much of the quaintness that belonged to our writers of the fifteenth century. In the course of many revisals I have delivered myself from this evil, I believe, entirely; but I have done it slowly, and as a man separates himself from his mistress when he is going to marry. I had so strong a predilection in favour of this style at first, that I was crazed to find that others were not as much enamoured with it as myself. At every passage of that sort which I obliterated, I groaned bitterly, and said to myself, I am spoiling my work to please those who have no taste for the simple graces of antiquity. But in measure, as I adopted a more modern phraseology, I became a convert to their opinion, and in the last revisal, which I am now making, am not sensible of having spared a single expression of the obsolete kind. I see my work so much improved by this alteration, that I am filled with wonder at my own backwardness to assent to the neceșsity of it, and the more when I consider that Milton, with whose manner I account myself intimately acquainted, is never quaint, never twangs through the

nose, but is every where grand and elegant, without resorting to musty antiquity for his beauties. On the contrary, he took a long stride forward, left the language of his own day far behind him, and anticipated the expressions of a century yet to come.

I have now, as I said, no longer any doubt of of the event, but I will give thee a shilling if thou wilt tell me what I shall say in my Preface. It is an affair of much delicacy, and I have as many opinions about it as there are whims in a weather-cock.

Send my мss. and thine when thou wilt.

In a

day or two I shall enter on the last Iliad, when I have finished it I shall give the Odyssey one more reading, and shall therefore shortly have occasion for the copy in thy possession, but you see that there is no need to hurry.

I leave the little space for Mrs. Unwin's use, who means, I believe, to occupy it,

And am evermore thine most truly,

W. C.

Postscript in the hand of Mrs. Unwin.

You cannot imagine how much your Ladyship would oblige your unworthy servant, if you would be