How pleasing was that half-hour to me, in which we conversed on Persian poetry, our mutual delight! I considered it the commencement of a most agreeable friendship and intercourse between us; but my expectations are disappointed by the circumstances in which we are unavoidably placed; for my business will confine me to the country longer than I wish; and you, as I am informed, are pre

This letter was written in Latin, and in the beginning of the year 1768. Count Reviczki was imperial minister at Warsaw, and afterwards ambassador at the court of England: he was deeply skilled in Orientál literature.

paring to return immediately to Germany. I have, therefore to lament, that our intimacy is, as it were, nipped in the bud. I am not, however, without this consolation; that if I cannot personally converse with you, I can at least correspond with you, and thus enjoy the satisfaction arising from a communication of our sentiments and studies. In mentioning our friendship, I shall not, I trust, be deemed guilty of an improper freedom. Similarity of studies, fondness for polite literature, congenial pursuits, and conformity of sentiments, are the great bonds of intimacy amongst mankind. Our studies and pursuits are the same, with this difference indeed-that you are already deeply versed in Oriental learning, whilst I am incessantly labouring with all my might to obtain a proficiency in it. But I will not allow you to excel me in partiality for those studies, since nothing can exceed my delight in them. From my earliest years, I was charmed with the poetry of the Greeks; nothing, I then thought, could be more sublime than the odes of Pindar, nothing sweeter than Anacreon, nothing more polished or elegant than the golden remains of Sappho, Archilochus, Alcæus, and Simonides: but when I I had tasted the poetry of the Arabs and Persians *

The remainder of this letter is lost; but from the context, and the answer of Reviczki, we may conclude that it contained an elaborate panegyric on Eastern poetry.

II.

From C. Reviczki.*

SIR,

London, Feb. 19, 1768.

I

I AM highly gratified by your recollection of me, as well as by the repeated compliments which you pay me, in your letters to Madame de Vaucluse. must acknowledge, that I feel not a little proud of them; but still more, that an interview of a quarter of an hour has procured me the honour of your friendship. I should be most happy to cultivate it, if my plans allowed me to remain longer in this country, or if I could at least see you at Oxford, which I purpose visiting before I leave England. I hear with pleasure, that you have undertaken to publish a Treatise on Oriental Prosody. As I am convinced that you will perform this task most ably and successfully, I anticipate, with satisfaction, the mortification of all our European poets, who must blush at the poverty of their prosaic language, when they find that the Oriental dialects (independently of rhyme, which is of their invention) have true syllabic quantities, as well as the Greek, and a

* Written in French.

greater variety of feet, and consequently the true science of metre and prosody.

I take the liberty of sending you a rough sketch of one of my latest translations from Hafez, with whom I sometimes amuse myself in a leisure hour. You are too well acquainted with the genius of the Persian language, not to perceive the rashness of my attempt: I do not indeed pretend to give the beauty of the original, but merely its sense, simple and unornamented. I have added to it a very free paraphrase in verse, in which, however, the greatest deviation from the text consists in the occasional substitution of mistress for mignon, either to give a connexion to the stanzas, which in this kind of composition is never preserved, or to make it more conformable to our European taste. The Persian poet, indeed, speaks of his mistress in the first verse.

You will find in the margin several quotations from the Greek and Latin poets, which occurred to my recollection whilst I was reading Hafez, expressing the same sentiments with the Persian. I hope to have the satisfaction of seeing you here before I leave England, assuring you with truth, that I consider the honour of your acquaintance among the greatest advantages attending my visit to this country.

I am, &c.