Imatges de pàgina
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Every thing is politics. There are no literary productions worth your notice, at least of our country. The French have finished their great Encyclopedia in seventeen volumes; but there are many flimsy articles very hastily treated, and great incorrectness of the press. There are now thirteen volumes of Buffon's Natural History; and he is not come to the monkeys yet, who are a numerous people. The Life of Petrarch has entertained me; it is not well written, but very curious, and laid together from his own letters and the original writings of the fourteenth century: so that he takes in much of the history of those obscure times, and the characters of many remarkable persons. There are two volumes quarto; and another, unpublished yet, will complete it.

Mr. Walpole writes me now and then a long and lively letter from Paris; to which place he went last year with the gout upon him, sometimes in his limbs, often in his stomach and head. He has got somehow well (not by means of the climate, one would think), goes to all public places, sees all the best company, and is very much in fashion. He says he sunk like Queen Eleanor at Charing-cross, and has risen again at Paris. He returns in April. I saw the lady you inquire after, when I was in London, and a prodigious fine one she is. She had a strong suspicion of rouge on her cheeks, a cage of foreign birds and a piping bullfinch at her elbow; two little dogs on a cushion in her lap, and a cockatoo on her shoulder; they were all exceeding glad to see me, and I them.

LIII. MR. GRAY TO DR. WHARTON.

Pembroke-hall, Aug. 26, 1766.

WHATEVER my pen may do, I am sure my thoughts expatiate no where oftener, or with more pleasure, than to Old Park. I hope you have made my peace with the angry little lady. It is certain, whether her name were in my letter or not, she was as present to my memory as the rest of the whole family; and I desire you would present her with two kisses in my name, and one apiece to all the others; for I shall take the liberty to kiss them all (great and small), as you are to be my proxy.*

In spite of the rain, which I think continued, with very short intervals, till the beginning of this month, and quite effaced the summer from the year, I made a shift to pass May and June not disagreeably in Kent. I was surprised at the beauty of the road to Canterbury, which (I know not why) had not struck me before. The whole country is a rich and well-cultivated garden; orchards, cherry-grounds, hop-gardens, intermixed with corn and frequent villages; gentle rising's covered with wood, and every where the Thames and Medway breaking in upon the landscape with all their navigation. It was indeed owing to the bad weather that the whole scene was dressed in that tender emerald green, which one usually sees only for a fortnight in the opening of the spring; and this continued till I left the country. My residence was eight miles east of Canterbury, in a little quiet valley on the skirts of Barham-Down. In these parts the whole soil is chalk, and whenever it holds up, in half an hour it is dry enough to walk out. I took the opportunity of three or four days' fine weather to go into the Isle of Thanet; saw Margate (which is Bartholomew fair by the sea-side), Ramsgate, and other places there; and so came by Sandwich, Deal, Dover, Folkstone, and Hithe, back again. The coast is not like Hartlepool; there are no rocks, but only chalky cliffs of no great height till you come to Dover; there indeed they are noble and picturesque, and the opposite coasts of France begin to bound your view, which was left before to range unlimited by any thing but the horizon; yet it is by no means a shipless sea, but every where peopled with white sails, and vessels of all sizes in motion: and take notice (except in the Isle, which is all corn-fields, and has very little inclosure), there are in all places hedge-rows, and tall trees even within a few yards of the beach. Particularly, Hithe stands on an eminence covered with wood. I shall confess we had fires at night (ay, and at day too) several times in June; but do not go and take advantage in the north at this, for it was the most untoward year that ever I remember.

* Some readers will think this paragraph very trifling; yet many, I hope, will take it, as I give it, for a pleasing example of the amiableness of his domestic character.

† At Denton, where his friend the Rev. William Robinson, brother to Matthew Robinson, Esq. late member for Canterbury, then resided.

Have you read the New Bath Guide? It is the only thing in fashion, and is a new and original kind of humour. Miss Prue's conversion, I doubt, you will paste down, as a certain Yorkshire baronet did before he carried it to his daughters: yet I remember you all read Crazy Tales without pasting. Buffon's first collection of Monkeys is come out (it makes the fourteenth volume), something, but not much to my edification; for he is pretty well acquainted with their persons, but not with their manners.

My compliments to Mrs. Wharton and all your family; I will not name them, lest I should affront any body.

LIV. MR. GRAY TO MR. MASON.

March 28, 1767.

I BREAK in upon you at a moment, when we least of all are permitted to disturb our friends, only to say, that you are daily and hourly present to my thoughts. If the worst* be not yet past, you will neglect and pardon

• As this little billet (which I received at the Hot Wells at Bristol) then breathed, and still seems to breathe, the very voice of friendship in its tenderest and most pathetic note, I cannot refrain from publishing it in this place. I opened it almost at the precise moment when it would necessarily be the most affecting.

me: but if the last struggle be over; if the poor object
of your long anxieties be no longer sensible to your
kindness, or to her own sufferings, allow me (at least
in idea, for what could I do, were I present, more
than this?) to sit by you in silence, and pity from my
heart not her, who is at rest, but you, who lose her.
May He, who made us, the Master of our pleasures
and of our pains, preserve and support you! Adieu!
I have long understood how little you had to hope.

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LV. MR. GRAY TO MR. BEATTIE.

Old Park, near Darlington, Durham,
Aug. 12, 1767.

I RECEIVED from Mr. Williamson, that very obliging mark you were pleased to give me of your remembrance: had I not entertained some slight hopes of revisiting Scotland this summer, and consequently of seeing you at Aberdeen, I had sooner acknowledged, by letter, the favour you have done me. Those hopes are now at an end; but I do not therefore despair of seeing again a country that has given me so much pleasure; nor of telling you, in person, how much I esteem you and (as you choose to call them) your amusements: the specimen of them, which you were so good to send me, I think excellent; the sentiments are such as a melancholy imagination naturally suggests in solitude and silence, and that (though light and business may suspend or banish them at times) return with but so much the greater force upon a feeling heart: the diction is elegant and unconstrained; not loaded with epithets and figures, nor flagging into prose; the versification is easy and harmonious. My only objection is * * * * * †

+ A paragraph is here omitted, as it contained merely a few particular criticisms; a liberty of the same kind I have before taken in some of the preceding letters. The poem in question contained many touching reflections on mortality: it is to be hoped Dr. Beattie will one day give it to the public.

You see, Sir, I take the liberty you indulged me in, when I first saw you; and therefore I make no excuses for it, but desire you would take your revenge on me in kind.

I have read over (but too hastily) Mr. Ferguson's book. There are uncommon strains of eloquence in it: and I was surprised to find not one single idiom of his country (I think) in the whole work. He has not the fault you mention:* his application to the heart is frequent, and often successful. His love of Montesquieu and Tacitus has led him into a manner of writing too short-winded and sententious; which those great men, had they lived in better times and under a better government, would have avoided.

I know no pretence that I have to the honour Lord Gray is pleased to do me:† but if his lordship chooses to own me, it certainly is not my business to deny it. I say not this merely on account of his quality, but because he is a very worthy and accomplished person. I am truly sorry for the great loss he has had since I left Scotland. If you should chance to see him, I will beg you to present my respectful humble service to his lordship.

I gave Mr. Williamson all the information I was able in the short time he staid with me. He seemed to answer well the character you gave me of him: but what I chiefly envied in him, was his ability of walking all the way from Aberdeen to Cambridge, and back again; which if I possessed, you would soon see your obliged, &c.

• To explain this, I must take the liberty to transcribe a paragraph from Mr. Beattie's letter, dated March 30, to which the above is an answer: "A professor at Edinburgh has published an Essay on the History of Civil Society, but I have not seen it. It is a fault common to almost all our Scotch authors, that they are too metaphysical: I wish they would learn to speak more to the heart, and less to the understanding; but, alas! this is a talent which Heaven only can bestow: whereas the philosophic spirit (as we call it) is merely artificial and level to the capacity of every man, who has much patience, a little learning, and no taste." He has since dilated on this just sentiment in his admirable Essay on the Immutability of Truth. + Lord Gray had said that our Author was related to his family.

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