Letters of AunaSeward, 
them. Concern, esteem, and pity, were 
avowed in those of the general, and 
warm. entreaties that he would urge Ge- 
neral. Clintun to resign Arnold in. ex. 
change for himself, as the only means to 
avert that sacrifice which the laws of 
war demanded. Mr. André’s letters 
breathed a spirit of gratitude to General 
Washington for the interest he took in 
his preservation, but firmly declined the 
application to General Clinton. The 
other papers were minutes of the court- 
martial, from which it appeared, that 
General Washington had laboured to 
avert the sentence against André, and to 
soften the circumstances of disguised 
dress, and of those fatal drawings of the 
enemies’ outworks and situation, which 
placed him in the character of a spy 
rather than that of a negotiator. The 
general’s next fruitless endeavour was to 
have obtained the grant of poor Andre’s 
petition, to die a less disgraceful death, 
His voice, though commander of the 
American armies, counted but as one on 
the court-martial. General Washington 
did me the honour to charge his aide-de- 
camp to assure me, that po circumstance 
of his life had given him so much pain as 
the necessary sacrifice of André’s life, 
and that next to that deplored event, the 
censure passed upon himself in a poem 
which he admired, and for which he 
loyed the author; also to express his 
hope,. that, whenever I reprinted the 
Monody, a note might be added, which 
should tend to acquit him of that imputed 
inexorable and cruel severity which had 
doomed to ignominious death a gallant 
and amiable prisoner of war. 
ere DR. DARWIN, 
" While he lived here he was not in the 
habit of throwing his imagination into 
his letters; they were rather hurried over 
as tasks than written con amore. I have 
often heard him say he did not possess 
the epistolary graces. He told me one 
day, when I was about six or seven-and- 
twenty, that he wished to write to Dr. 
Franklin, to compliment him upon ha. 
ving united modern science and philoso- 
phy; and gesired IT would put his 
houghts into my own language. He 
took his pen, and, throwing ou paper the 
heads of what he purposed gaying, de- 
sired I would give them verbal ornament, 
and that he would call next day for the 
result. He did call; and, looking over 
what I had written, laughingly com- 
mended the style ; copied the manuscript 
. 7 
3 4 -+ «a 
SUI 
€39 
verbatim in:my presence, directed that 
copy to Dr. Franklin, America, and sent 
it instantly to the post-oftice by my fa- 
ther’s servant, : 
COWPER’S LETTERS. 
Certainly Cowper’s !etters are those of 
a mind not ordinarily gifted; yet, if I 
could forget that they proceeded froma 
pen which had produced one great ori- 
ginal work, they would by no.means shew 
me an understanding responsible for sucha 
a production, For the impartially inge- 
nious surely they do not possess the lites 
tary usefulness of Pope’s letters; the wit 
;and imagination of Gray’s, the strength 
and humour of Dr. Johnson’s, or the 
brilliance, the grace, the play of fancy, 
- which, in former years, rendered. your 
letters. to me equal to the best of .Ma- 
dame Sevigné’s, whose domestic beauties 
seem to me to throw those of Cowper 
into shade. I mean the generality of his 
epistles. Some few of them are very 
interesting egotism, for all is egotism; 
such of them as describe his home, his 
daily haunts, and the habits of his life, 
Neither can a feeling heart contemplate 
undelighted the effusions of his personal 
tenderness for his friends, inconsistent 
as they were with the apathy and neg- 
lect towards his poetic contemporaries. 
I thank you for your third volume of 
Cowper, which arrived the first of this 
month, Its contents, perused with delie 
berate attention, still deeper impress my 
conviction that far indeed from perfect 
was Cowper’s character, his judgment, 
or his epistolary style; that his character 
was sullied by want of charity to the 
failings of others, and by an unsocial 
exclusion of all except a few worshippers, 
whose attention himself and his, writings 
wholly engrossed—his judgment per- 
verted by jealous prejudice against the 
compositions of contemporary genius: 
his epistolary style, by a dearth of imas 
gination and eloquence, inconceivable 
to me from the pen which gave us the 
‘Task. ; 
REVIEWERS. ae 
When I was at Bristol last summer, a 
lady said to me, ‘*My son,is of Mer- 
chat Taylors’ school. He has there a 
friend and schoolfellow, not yet sixteen, 
who has heen employed by one of the 
review editors to write strictures for his 
‘work, on your Memoirs of Dr. Darwin.” 
Such are often the presumptuous deci- 
ders on new publications. 
@PINIONS 
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