(I will date when I finish.)--I received a Note from Haslam yesterday--asking if my letter is ready--now this is only the second sheet--notwithstanding all my promises. But you must reflect what hindrances I have had. However on sealing this I shall have nothing to prevent my proceeding in a gradual journal, which will increase in a Month to a considerable size. I will insert any little pieces I may write--though I will not give any extracts from my large poem which is scarce began. I want to hear very much whether Poetry and literature in general has gained or lost interest with you--and what sort of writing is of the highest gust with you now. With what sensation do you read Fielding?--and do not Hogarth's pictures seem an old thing to you? Yet you are very little more removed from general association than I am--recollect that no Man can live but in one society at a time--his enjoyment in the different states of human society must depend upon the Powers of his Mind--that is you can imagine a Roman triumph or an Olympic game as well as I can. We with our bodily eyes see but the fashion and Manners of one country for one age--and then we die. Now to me manners and customs long since passed whether among the Babylonians or the Bactrians are as real, or even more real than those among which I now live--My thoughts have turned lately this way--The more we know the more inadequacy we find in the world to satisfy us--this is an old observation; but I have made up my Mind never to take anything for granted--but even to examine the truth of the commonest proverbs--This however is true. Mrs. Tighe and Beattie once delighted me--now I see through them and can find nothing in them but weakness, and yet how many they still delight! Perhaps a superior being may look upon Shakspeare in the same light--is it possible? No--This same inadequacy is discovered (forgive me, little George, you know I don't mean to put you in the mess) in Women with few exceptions--the Dress Maker, the blue Stocking, and the most charming sentimentalist differ but in a slight degree and are equally smokeable. But I'll go no further--I may be speaking sacrilegiously--and on my word I have thought so little that I have not one opinion upon anything except in matters of taste--I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty--and I find myself very young minded even in that perceptive power--which I hope will increase. A year ago I could not understand in the slightest degree Raphael's cartoons--now I begin to read them a little--And how did I learn to do so? By seeing something done in quite an opposite spirit--I mean a picture of Guido's in which all the Saints, instead of that heroic simplicity and unaffected grandeur which they inherit from Raphael, had each of them both in countenance and gesture all the canting, solemn, melodramatic mawkishness of Mackenzie's father Nicholas. When I was last