I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, [1] and with your leave will try my hand at it again. A master-joiner, you know, may leave a cabinet to be finished, when his own hands are full. To your list of illustrative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I will take leave to add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wife for a Month;" 'tis the conclusion of a description of a sea-fight: "The game of _death_ was never played so nobly; the meagre thief grew wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk, hollow eyes smiled on his ruins." There is fancy in these of a lower order from "Bonduca": "Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly." Not that it is a personification, only it just caught my eye in a little extract-book I keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted. Are you acquainted with Massinger? At a hazard I will trouble you with a passage from a play of his called "A Very Woman." The lines are spoken by a lover (disguised) to his faithless mistress. You will remark the fine effect of the double endings. You will by your ear distinguish the lines, for I write 'em as prose. "Not far from where my father lives, _a lady_, a neighbor by, blest with as great a _beauty_ as Nature durst bestow without _undoing_, dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, and blest the house a thousand times she _dwelt_ in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate _incense_, nor I no way to flatter but my _fondness_; in all the bravery my friends could _show me_, in all the faith my innocence could _give me_, in the best language my true tongue could _tell me_, and all the broken sighs my sick heart _lend me_, I sued and served; long did I serve this _lady_, long was my travail, long my trade to _win her_; with all the duty of my soul I SERVED HER." "Then she must love." "She did, but never me: she could not _love me_; she would not love, she hated,--more, she _scorned me_; and in so a poor and base a way _abused me_ for all my services, for all my _bounties_, so bold neglects flung on me." "What out of love, and worthy love, I _gave her_ (shame to her most unworthy mind!), to fools, to girls, to fiddlers and her boys she flung, all in disdain of me." One more passage strikes my eye from B. and F.'s "Palamon and Arcite." One of 'em complains in prison: "This is all our world; we shall know nothing here but one another, hear nothing but the clock that tells us our woes; the vine shall grow, but we shall never see it," etc. Is not the last circumstance exquisite? I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins in sublimity. But don't you conceive all poets after Shakspeare yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger