compositions) is too sombre.  The flimsy giantry of Ossian has introduced mountainous horrors.  The exhibitions at Somerset-house are crowded with Brobdignag ghosts.  Read and explain to her a charming poetic familiarity called the Blue-stocking Club.  If she has not your other pieces, might I take the liberty, Madam, of begging you to buy them for her, and let me be in your debt?  And that your lessons may win their way more easily, even though her heart be good, will you add a guinea or two, as you see proper?  And though I do not love to be named, yet, if it would encourage a subscription, I should have no scruple.  It will be best to begin moderately! for, if she should take Hippocrene for Pactolus, we may hasten her ruin, not contribute to her fortune.

On recollection, you had better call me Mr. Anybody, than name my name, which I fear is in bad odour at Bristol, on poor Chatterton’s account; and it may be thought that I am atoning his ghost:  though, if his friends would show my letters to him, you would find that I was as tender to him as to your milkwoman:  but that they have never done, among other instances of their injustice.  However, I beg you to say nothing on that subject, as I have declared I would not.

I have seen our excellent friend in Clarges-street:  she complains as usual of her deafness; but I assure you it is at least not worse, nor is her weakness.  Indeed I think both her and Mr. Vesey better than last winter.  When will you blue-stocking yourself and come amongst us?  Consider how many of us are veterans; and, though we do not trudge on foot according to the institution, we may be out at heels-and the heel, you know, Madam, has never been privileged.

(537) Mrs. Yearsley, the milkwoman of Bristol, whose talent was discovered by Miss Hannah More, who solicited for her the protection of Mrs. Montagu, in a prefatory letter prefixed to her Poems, published in quarto, in the year 1785.-E.

(538) Some of Stephen Duck the thresher’s verses having been shown to Queen Caroline she settled twelve shillings a-week upon him, and appointed him keeper of her select library at Richmond.(539) He afterwards took orders, and obtained the living of Byfleet, in Surrey; but growing melancholy, in 1750, he threw himself into the river, near Reading, and was drowned.  Swift wrote upon him the following epigram—­

The thresher, Duck, could o’er the Queen prevail;
The proverb says, No fence against a flail;
>From threshing corn, he turns to thresh his brains,
For which her Majesty allow him grains;
Though ’tis confest, that those who ever saw
His poems, think them all not worth a straw. 
Thrice happy Duck! employ’d in threshing stubble,
Thy toil is lessen’d, and thy profits double."-E.

(539) “Robert Bloomfield,” says Mr. Crabbe, in his journal for 1817, “had better have rested as a shoemaker, or even a farmer’s boy; for he would have been a farmer perhaps in time, and now he is an unfortunate poet.”  Poor John Clare, it will be recollected, died in a workhouse.-E.