110 CORRESPONDENCE WITH HIS FAMILY. 



5000. Altogether her children will be finely provided for. 

 I am concerned to hear that Mrs. K. Isaac has such poor 

 health. With respects to all the family, I conclude, 

 Dear Sister, your affectionate and obliged Brother, 



GIL. WHITE. 



Mr. and Mrs. Etty and niece join in respects. Friends are 

 well at Newton. Bro. John is in pretty good forwardness 

 with his Fauna Calpensis, or Natural Hist, of Gibraltar. 



I forgot to tell my nephew in the proper place that Dry- 

 den's ode on St. Cecilia is nothing else, for an hundred lines 

 together, but beautiful numbers, finely adapted to the sense. 



He will, I hope, write soon. 



Fierce frost at present, with snow. Woe to the wall-fruit ! 



LETTER X. 



TO SAMUEL BARKER. 



March 30, 1775, 



DEAR SAM, 



As I took no copy of my last hasty letter on Poetry, I am 

 not very certain how far I went in that subject, and what I 

 omitted. However, I think I said nothing concerning the 

 power that masterly writers possess of adapting their numbers 

 to their subjects, or rendering the sound an " echo to the 

 sense." 



Homer and Virgil no doubt enjoyed this faculty in great 

 perfection, and have shewed wonderful instances of it ; but 

 then you must remember that fanciful commentators have 

 over-refined on this power, and have found numberless beau- 

 ties of this kind which the authors neither percieved nor in- 

 tended. 



The English language is very capable of being conducted 

 to this perfection ; and Pope in particular, in his translation 

 of the Iliad, has frequently imitated the original most happily 

 in this way. In his essay on criticism (which he published, 



