TO JOSEPH HILL, ESQ.
Weston, March 10, 1791.
Give my affectionate remembrances to your sisters, and tell them I am impatient to entertain them with my old story new dressed.
I have two French prints hanging in my study, both on Iliad subjects; and I have an English one in the parlour, on a subject from the same poem. In one of the former, Agamemnon addresses Achilles exactly in the attitude of a dancing-master turning miss in a minuet: in the latter, the figures are plain, and the attitudes plain also. This is, in some considerable measure, I believe, the difference between my translation and Pope's; and will serve as an exemplification of what I am going to lay before you and the public.
W. C.
TO THE REV. WALTER BAGOT.
Weston, March 18, 1791.
My dear Friend,—I give you joy that you are about to receive some more of my elegant prose, and I feel myself in danger of attempting to make it even more elegant than usual, and thereby of spoiling it, under the influence of your commendations. But my old helter-skelter manner has already succeeded so well, that I will not, even for the sake of entitling myself to a still greater portion of your praise, abandon it.
I did not call in question Johnson's true spirit of poetry, because he was not qualified to relish blank verse, (though, to tell you the truth, I think that but an ugly symptom,) but, if I did not express it, I meant however to infer it; from the perverse judgment that he has formed of our poets in general; depreciating some of the best, and making honourable mention of others, in my opinion, not undeservedly neglected. I will lay you sixpence that, had he lived in the days of Milton, and by any accident had met with his "Paradise Lost," he would neither have directed the attention of others to it, nor have much admired it himself. Good sense, in short, and strength of intellect, seem to me, rather than a fine taste, to have been his distinguishing characteristics. But should you think otherwise, you have my free permission; for so long as you have yourself a taste for the beauties of Cowper, I care not a fig whether Johnson had a taste or not.
I wonder where you find all your quotations, pat as they are to the present condition of France. Do you make them yourself, or do you actually find them? I am apt to suspect sometimes that you impose them only on a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother Chester's. They are, however, much to the purpose, be the author of them who he may.