Such insults virtuous poverty must bear.
I own that a ludicrous imitation of the style I have chosen, seems now like giving a blow to a man who is down; or, they might say, my blow is the Ass’s kick to the expiring Lion; for the whining pity for things not pitiable, the contempt and hatred of all who are comfortable as to this world’s goods, and of all institutions calculated to keep them so, as well as addresses to frogs, fleas, donkeys, and spiders, are equally out of fashion.
I have been reading Cymbeline, and find five pages of admiring criticism on the song, ‘Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings.’ Pray read it, and then tell me whether you do not agree with me in thinking Shakespeare wrote it to ridicule some compositions of the time, now forgotten; as he often has done in other pieces, particularly as it is introduced with praise by his fool, Cloten. The language is so forced and unnatural, the imagery so far-fetched and overstrained, the grammar so bad, and the sacrifice of sense to rhyme so evident, that I cannot view it in any other light, and am surprised it has not been so considered. You see how I am obliged to keep thought at bay by every help I can pick up.
TO MRS. LEADBEATER.
London, March 10, 1808.
Your kind letter found me safely deposited in London with my babes. A heavy cold, in consequence of travelling through roads dug out of snow, combined with other circumstances to delay my answer. We set out in the softest, finest weather possible; and the same day our journey began, the snow began also, and locked us up in a small and solitary inn in the wildest part of Wales during four days, which, however, I passed very pleasantly. I need not explain this to you, and to many I could not explain it; for I assure you the excess of pity which has been lavished on my husband and me, for having been four days wholly dependant on each other’s society for amusement, has raised in me many an inward smile, as being (while intended for politeness) the very essence of rudeness. ‘Dear me, so you were four days in that terrible way. How you must have suffered from ennui, &c. &c.’ In vain I tell people that I am not subject to ennui, &c. &c.; they will continue to pity, till I am more tired of them than they could be of retirement.
Your idea of the motive for writing The Butterfly’s Ball is so ingenious, one inclines to suppose it just. My dread of some insects was long troublesome to myself and others. Your favourites, the bees, formerly excited in me a degree of terror and disgust never entirely removed till I was once or twice stung. Many would say this was a strange method of cure, but you know enough of imagination to feel the advantage of correcting her caricatures by comparison with reality. My children, on the contrary, are pleased with everything that has life and motion; and I find some exertion necessary, when they insist on my admiring the beauties of a huge beetle or the labours of an enormous spider.