sorry to get to the end of them, and have no desire
to go regularly through them again. I consider myself a thorough adept in
Richardson. I like the longest of his novels best, and think no part of
them tedious; nor should I ask to have any thing better to do than to
read them from beginning to end, to take them up when I chose, and lay
them down when I was tired, in some old family mansion in the country,
till every word and syllable relating to the bright Clarissa, the divine
Clementina, the beautiful Pamela, "with every trick and line of their
sweet favour," were once more "graven in my heart's table."[150] I have a
sneaking kindness for Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne--for the deserted
mansion, and straggling gilliflowers on the mouldering garden-wall; and
still more for his Man of Feeling; not that it is better, nor so good; but
at the time I read it, I sometimes thought of the heroine, Miss Walton,
and of Miss ---- together, and "that ligament, fine as it was, was never
broken!"--One of the poets that I have always read with most pleasure, and
can wander about in for ever with a sort of voluptuous indolence, is
Spenser; and I like Chaucer even better. The only writer among the
Italians I can pretend to any knowledge of, is Boccacio, and of him I
cannot express half my admiration. His story of the Hawk I could read and
think of from day to day, just as I would look at a picture of Titian's!--

I remember, as long ago as the year 1798, going to a neighbouring town
(Shrewsbury, where Farquhar has laid the plot of his Recruiting Officer)
and bringing home with me, "at one proud swoop," a copy of Milton's
Paradise Lost, and another of Burke's Reflections on the French
Revolution--both which I have still; and I still recollect, when I see
the covers, the pleasure with which I clipped into them as I returned with
my double prize. I was set up for one while. That time is past "with all
its giddy raptures:" but I am still anxious to preserve its memory,
"embalmed with odours."--With respect to the first of these works, I would
be permitted to remark here in passing, that it is a sufficient answer to
the German criticism which has since been started against the character of
Satan (_viz._ that it is not one of disgusting deformity, or pure,
defecated malice) to say that Milton has there drawn, not the abstract
principle of evil, not a devil incarnate, but a fallen angel. This is the
Scriptural account, and the poet has followed