J 01 



fection their heads and hearts deserve, and as some 

 of my most intimate friends, though we only became 

 acquainted last summer. 



Notwithstanding my having just filled two sheets 

 to the Aikin family, and that I have reached the top 

 of my third page to you, I know not how to cease 

 talking to you; remember the restriction which has 

 been laid upon my tongue, and consider that even 

 the pen is a welcome substitute. Lucy Aikin is 

 suffering under the same prohibition, and we have 

 some joking upon the subject, — yet I am very serious 

 about her. Her letters contain the sound sense and 

 just criticism of a healthy mind, whatever may be 

 the state of her body. Our attention has been much 

 drawn to Cowper lately, — hers by the perusal of the 

 new edition of his Iliad, and mine by his Life and 

 Letters. Whether his interesting and unhappy ma- 

 lady was purely physical, or whether gloomy reading 

 and conversation contributed to it, — if I had been his 

 biographer, I should have freely expressed my feel- 

 ings respecting Calvinism : you and I cannot bear 

 such representations of the Father of the whole hu- 

 man race*. That I may engross no more of your 



* This alludes to the doctrine of election and reprobation: yet 

 the kindness and christian charity of Sir James's heart cannot be 

 more clearly discerned than in his mode of reflecting on certain 

 doctrines which he considered injurious to the impartial justice 

 of God, and as tending directly to immorality. — In speaking of 

 these he often observed, that the goodness of human nature, which 

 they who hold these opinions so much depreciate, overcomes a 

 bad system of religion ; and that the alembic of an honest heart and 

 sensitive conscience transmutes a poisonous doctrine into whole- 

 some food. 



