On the other hand, it is the essence of ode to neglect circumstance, being more confin’d in its plan, and having the sublime equally for its object. In order to attain this, it is obliged to deal in general terms, to give only such hints as will forcibly strike the imagination, from which we may infer the particulars ourselves. It is no demerit or disparagement in your bard to have neglected the minute circumstances of the battle, because it would have been impossible for him to have described them within the narrow limits of his ode. Here lies his great merit, that he hints, he drops, and the images he throws out, supply the absence of a more minute detail, and excite as grand ideas as the best description could have done. And so far I agree with your critical friend, that no poet ever hit upon a grander image than that of “_A Menai heb drai o drallanw_,” &c., nor could take a nobler method to excite our admiration at the prodigious cause of so amazing an effect. So much for criticism. Soon after I received your letter I was down at Cambridge, where I had the good fortune to meet with Mr. Gray, the poet, and spent an afternoon with him at his chambers. Our discourse turned on you and the Welsh poetry: I shewed him your letter, and he desired leave to transcribe the passage relating to King Edward’s massacre of the Welsh bards. All the authority he had before, it seems, was only a short hint in Carte’s history: he seemed very glad of this authentic extract. We both join’d in wishing a speedy conclusion to your historical labours, that you might be at leisure to enter upon this far more noble field of ancient British poetry. Excuse me if I think the recovery of particular facts from oblivion, any further than as they contribute to throw light upon compositions, not half of so much consequence to the world, as to recover the compositions themselves.