n her travail strives to take the worst it gives;
With thought, _it must be, 'tis love's fruit, the end for which
she lives;
The mean to make herself new born, what comforts_ will redound!
So," etc.

I will tell you more about Chapman and his peculiarities in my next. I
am much interested in him.

Yours ever affectionately, and Pi-Pos's,

C. L.

XL.

TO MANNING.

_November_, 1802.

My Dear Manning,--I must positively write, or I shall miss you at
Toulouse. I sit here like a decayed minute-hand (I lie; _that_ does not
_sit_), and being myself the exponent of no time, take no heed how the
clocks about me are going. You possibly by this time may have explored
all Italy, and toppled, unawares, into Etna, while you went too near
those rotten-jawed, gap-toothed, old worn-out chaps of hell,--while I am
meditating a quiescent letter to the honest postmaster at Toulouse. But
in case you should not have been _felo de se_, this is to tell you that
your letter was quite to my palate; in particular your just remarks upon
Industry, cursed Industry (though indeed you left me to explore the
reason), were highly relishing.

I've often wished I lived in the Golden Age, before doubt, and
propositions, and corollaries, got into the world. _Now_, as Joseph
Cottle, a Bard of Nature, sings, going up Malvern Hills,--

"How steep, how painful the ascent!
It needs the evidence of _close deduction_
To know that ever I shall gain the top."

You must know that Joe is lame, so that he had some reason for so
singing. These two lines, I assure you, are taken _totidem literis_ from
a very _popular_ poem. Joe is also an epic poet as well as a
descriptive, and has written a tragedy, though both his drama and
epopoiea are strictly _descriptive_, and chiefly of the _beauties of
nature_, for Toe thinks _man_, with all his passions and frailties, not:
a proper subject of the _drama_. Joe's tragedy hath the following
surpassing speech in it. Some king is told that his enemy has engaged
twelve archers to come over in a boat from an enemy's country and
way-lay him; he thereupon pathetically exclaims,--

"_Twelve_, dost thou say? Curse on those dozen villains!"

Cottle read two or three acts out to as, very gravely on both sides,
till he came to this heroic touch,--and then he asked what we laughed
at? I had no more muscles that day. A poet that chooses to read out his
own verses has but a limited power over yo