second madman, Lord Charles Hay, is luckily dead, and has saved much trouble.

Have you seen the works of the philosopher of Sans Souci, or rather of the man who is no philosopher, and who had more Souci than any man now in Europe? How contemptible they are! Miserable poetry; not a new thought, nor an old one newly expressed. I say nothing of the folly of publishing his aversion to the English, at the very time they are ruining themselves for him; nor of the greater folly of his irreligion. The epistle to Keith is puerile and shocking. He is not so sensible as Lord Ferrers, who did not think such sentiments ought to be published. His Majesty could not resist the vanity of showing how disengaged he can be even at this time.

I am going to give a letter for you to Strange, the engraver, who is going to visit Italy. He is a very first-rate artist, and by far our best. Pray countenance him, though you will not approve his politics. I believe Albano is his Loretto.

I shall finish this vast volume with a very good story, though not so authentic as my sheriff's. It is said that General Clive's father has been with Mr. Pitt, to notify, that if the government will send his son four hundred thousand pounds, and a certain number of ships, the heaven-born general knows of a part of India, where such treasures are buried, that he will engage to send over enough to pay the national debt. "Oh!" said the minister, that is too much; fifty millions would be sufficient." Clive insisted on the hundred millions,-Pitt, that half would do as well. "Lord, Sir!" said the old man, sider, if your administration lasts, the national debt will soon be two hundred millions." Good night for a twelvemonth!

66

66 con

SIR,

TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.

Arlington Street, May 15, 1760.

I AM extremely sensible of your obliging kindness in sending me for Mr. Gray the account of Erse poetry, even at a time when you were so much out of order. That indisposition I hope is entirely removed, and your health perfectly re-established. Mr. Gray is very thankful for the information.

a "The town are reading the King of Prussia's poetry, and I have done like the town; they do not seem so sick of it as I am. It is all the scum of Voltaire and Bolingbroke, the crambe recocta of our worst freethinkers tossed up in German-French rhyme." Gray, vol. iii. p. 241.

Strange was a confirmed Jacobite.

The residence of the Pretender.

d Now first collected.

The following is Gray's description of these poems, in a letter to Wharton.-"I am gone mad about them. They are said to be translations (literal and in prose) from the Erse tongue, done by one Macpherson, a young clergyman in the Highlands. He means to publish a collection he has of these specimens of antiquity; but what plagues me is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I was so struck, so extasie, with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand inquiries. The letters I have in

I have lately bought, intending it for Dr. Robertson, a Spanish MS. called "Annals del Emperador Carlos V. Autor, Francisco Lopez de Gornara." As I am utterly ignorant of the Spanish tongue, I do not know whether there is the least merit in my purchase. It is not very long; if you will tell me how to convey it, I will send it to him.

We have nothing new but some Dialogues of the Dead by Lord Lyttelton. I cannot say they are very lively or striking. The best, I think, relates to your country, and is written with a very good design; an intention of removing all prejudices and disunion between the two parts of our island. I cannot tell you how the book is liked in general, for it appears but this moment.

You have seen, to be sure, the King of Prussia's Poems. If he intended to raise the glory of his military capacity by depressing his literary talents, he could not, I think, have succeeded better. One would think a man had been accustomed to nothing but the magnificence of vast armies, and to the tumult of drums and trumpets, who is incapable of seeing that God is as great in the most minute parts of creation as in the most enormous. His Majesty does not seem to admire a mite, unless it is magnified by a Brobdignag microscope! While he is struggling with the force of three empires, he fancies that it adds to his glory to be unbent enough to contend for laurels with the triflers of a French Parnassus! Adieu! Sir.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Strawberry Hill, May 24, 1760.

WELL! at last Sisson's machine sets out-but, my dear Sir, how you still talk of him! You seem to think him as grave and learned as a professor of Bologna-why, he is an errant, low, indigent mechanic, and however Dr. Perelli found him out, is a shuffling knave, and I fear no fitter to execute his orders than to write the letter you expect. Then there was my ignorance and your brother James's ignorance to be thrown into the account. For the drawing, Sisson says Dr. Perelli has the description of it already; however, I have insisted on his making a reference to that description in a scrawl we

return are ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, unsatisfactory, calculated (one would imagine) to deceive one, and yet not cunning enough to do it cleverly: in short, the whole external evidence would make one believe these fragments (for so he calls them, though nothing can be more entire) counterfeit; but the internal is so strong on the other side, that I am resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the devil and the kirk. It is impossible to convince me, that they were invented by the same man that writes me these letters. On the other hand, it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he should be able to translate them so admirably. In short, this man is the very demon of poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages." In another letter, he says,-"As to their authenticity, I have many enquiries, and have lately procured a letter from Mr. David Hume, the historian, which is more satisfactory than any thing I have yet met with on that subject. He says, 'Certain it is, that these poems are in every body's mouth in the Highlands, have been handed down from father to son, and are of an age beyond all memory and tradition.'" Works vol. iii. pp. 249, 257.-E.

1760.

65

The have with much ado extorted from him. I pray to Sir Isaac Newton that the machine may answer: it costs, the stars know what! whole charge comes to upwards of threescore pounds! He had received twenty pounds, and yet was so necessitous, that on our hesitating, he wrote me a most impertinent letter for his money. I dreaded at first undertaking a commission for which I was so unqualified, and though I have done all I could, I fear you and your friend will be but ill satisfied.

Along with the machine I have sent you some new books; Lord George's trial, Lord Ferrers's, and the account of him; a fashionable thing called Tristram Shandy, and my Lord Lyttelton's new Dialogues of the Dead, or rather Dead Dialogues; and something less valuable still than any of these, but which I flatter myself you will not despise; it is my own print, done from a picture that is reckoned very like— you must allow for the difference that twenty years since you saw me have made. That wonderful creature Lord Ferrers, of whom I told you so much in my last, and with whom I am not going to plague you much more, made one of his keepers read Hamlet to him the night before his death after he was in bed-paid all his bills in the morning as if leaving an inn, and half an hour before the sheriffs fetched him, corrected some verses he had written in the Tower in imitation of the Duke of Buckingham's epitaph, dubius sed non improbus vixi. What a noble author have I here to add to my Catalogue! For the other noble author, Lord Lyttelton, you will find his work paltry enough; the style, a mixture of bombast, poetry, and vulgarisms. Nothing new in the composition, except making people talk out of character is so. Then he loves changing sides so much, that he makes Lord Falkland and Hampden cross over and figure in like people in a country dance; not to mention their guardian angels, who deserve to be hanged for murder. He is angry too at Swift, Lucian, and Rabelais, as if they had laughed at him of all men living, and he seems to wish that one would read the last's Dissertation on Hippocrates instead of his History of Pantagruel. But I blame him most, when he was satirizing too free writers, for praising the King of Prussia's poetry, to which any thing of Bayle is harmless. I like best the Dialogue between the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Angus, and the character of his own first wife under that of Penelope. I need not tell you that Pericles is Mr. Pitt.

I have had much conversation with your brother James, and intend to have more with your eldest, about your nephew. He is a sweet boy, and has all the goodness of dear Gal. and dear you in his countenance. They have sent him to Cambridge under that interested hog the Bishop of Chester, and propose to keep him there three

The following verses are said to have been found in Lord Ferrers's apartment in the "In doubt I lived, in doubt I die,

Tower:

Yet stand prepared the vast abyss to try,

And undismay'd expect eternity!"-E.

b Dr. Edmund Keene, brother of Sir Benjamin, and afterwards Eishop of Ely.

6*

years. Their apprehension seems to be of his growing a fine gentleman. I could not help saying, "Why, is he not to be one?" My wish is to have him with you-what an opportunity of his learning the world and business under such a tutor and such a parent! Oh! but they think he will dress and run into diversions. I tried to convince them that of all spots upon earth dress is least necessary at Florence, and where one can least divert oneself. I am answered with the necessity of Latin and mathematics-the one soon forgot, the other never got to any purpose. I cannot bear his losing the advantage of being brought up by you, with all the advantages of such a situation, and where he may learn in perfection living languages, never attained after twenty. I am so earnest on this, for I doat on him for dear Gal.'s sake, that I will insist to rudeness on his remaining at Cambridge but two years; and before that time you shall write to second my motions.

The Parliament is up, and news are gone out of town: I expect none but what we receive from Germany. As to the Pretender, his life or death makes no impression here. When a real King is so soon forgot, how should an imaginary one be remembered? Besides, since Jacobites have found the way to St. James's, it is grown so much the fashion to worship Kings, that people don't send their adorations so far as Rome. He at Kensington is likely long to outlast his old rival. The spring is far from warm, yet he wears a silk coat and has left off fires.

Thank you for the entertaining history of the Pope and the Genoese. I am flounced again into building-a round tower, gallery, cloister, and chapel, all starting up-if I am forced to run away by ruining myself, I will come to Florence, steal 'your nephew, and bring him with me. Adieu!

MY DEAR LORD,

TO THE EARL OF STRAFFORD.

Strawberry Hill, June 7, 1760.

WHEN at my time of day one can think a ball worth going to London for on purpose, you will not wonder that I am childish enough to write an account of it. I could give a better reason, your bidding me send you any news; but I scorn a good reason when I am idle enough to do any thing for a bad one.

You had heard, before you left London, of Miss Chudleigh's intended loyalty on the Prince's birthday. Poor thing, I fear she has thrown away above a quarter's salary! It was magnificent and wellunderstood-no crowd-and though a sultry night, one was not a moment incommoded. The court was illuminated on the whole summit of the wall with a battlement of lamps; smaller ones on every step, and a figure of lanterns on the outside of the house. The virginmistress began the ball with the Duke of York, who was dressed in a

pale blue watered tabby, which, as I told him, if he danced much, would soon be tabby all over, like the man's advertisement; but nobody did dance much. There was a new Miss Bishop from Sir Cecil's endless hoard of beauty daughters, who is still prettier than her sisters. The new Spanish embassy was there-alas! Sir Cecil Bishop has never been in Spain! Monsieur de Fuentes is a halfpenny print of my Lord Huntingdon. His wife homely, but seems goodhumoured and civil. The son does not degenerate from such highborn ugliness-the daughter-in-law was sick, and they say is not ugly, and has as good set of teeth as one can have, when one has but two and those black. They seem to have no curiosity, sit where they are placed, and ask no questions about so strange a country. Indeed, the ambassadress could see nothing; for Doddington stood before her the whole time, sweating Spanish at her, of which it was evident, by her, civil nods without answers, she did understand a word. She speaks bad French, danced a bad minuet, and went away -though there was a miraculous draught of fishes for their supper, as it was a fast-but being the octave of their fete-dieu, they dared not even fast plentifully. Miss Chudleigh desired the gamblers would go up into the garrets-"Nay, they are not garrets-it is only the roof of the house hollowed for upper servants-but I have no upper servants." Every body ran up there is a low gallery with bookcases, and four chambers practised under the pent of the roof, each hung with the finest Indian pictures on different colours, and with Chinese chairs of the same colours. Vases of flowers in each for nosegays, and in one retired nook a most critical couch!

The lord of the festival was there, and seemed neither ashamed nor vain of the expense of his pleasures. At supper she offered him Tokay, and told him she believed he would find it good. The supper was in two rooms and very fine, and on the sideboards, and even on the chairs, were pyramids and troughs of strawberries and cherries; you would have thought she was kept by Vertumnus. Last night. my Lady Northumberland lighted up her garden for the Spaniards: I was not there, having excused myself for a headache, which I had not, but ought to have caught the night before. Mr. Doddington entertained these Fuentes's at Hammersmith; and to the shame of our nation, while they were drinking tea in the summer-house, some gentlemen, ay, my lord, gentlemen, went into the river and showed the ambassadress and her daughter more than ever they expected to see of England.

I dare say you are sorry for poor Lady Anson. She was exceedingly good-humoured, and did a thousand good-natured and generous actions. I tell you nothing of the rupture of Lord Halifax's match, of which you must have heard so much; but you will like a bon-mot upon it. They say, the hundreds of Drury have got the better of

A staymaker of the time, who advertised in the newspapers that he made stays at such a price, "tabby all over." c The Duke of Kingston.

b Dodington had been minister in Spain.