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Posterity, I fear, will class me with the writers of this age, or forget me with them, not rank me with any names that deserve remembrance. If I cannot survive the Milles's, the What-d'ye-call-him's, and the compilers of catalogues of topography, it would comfort me very little to confute them. I should be as little proud of success as if I had carried a contest for churchwarden.

Not being able to return to Strawberry Hill, where all my books and papers are, and my printer lying fallow, I want some short bills to print. Have you anything you wish printed? I can either print a few to amuse ourselves, or, if very curious, and not too dry, could make a third number of Miscellaneous Antiquities.

I am not in any eagerness to see Mr. What-d'ye-call-him's pamphlet against me; therefore pray give yourself no trouble to get it for me. The specimens I have seen of his writing take off all edge from curiosity. A print of Mr. Gray will be a real present. Would it not be dreadful to be commended by an age that had not taste enough to admire his Odes? Is not it too great a compliment to me to be abused, too? I am ashamed! Indeed our antiquaries ought to like me. I am but too much on a par with them. Does not Mr. Henshaw come to London? Is he a professor, or only a lover of engraving? If the former, and he were to settle in town, I would willingly lend him heads to copy. Adieu!

TO THE REV. MR. COLE.

Arlington Street, Feb. 18, 1773.

THE most agreeable ingredient of your last, dear Sir, is the paragraph that tells me you shall be in town in April, when I depend on the pleasure of seeing you; but, to be certain, wish you would give me a few days' law, and let me know, too, where you lodge. Pray bring your books, though the continuation of the Miscellaneous Antiquities is uncertain. I thought the affectation of loving veteran anecdotes was so vigorous, that I ventured to print five hundred

copies. One hundred and thirty only are sold. I cannot afford to make the town perpetual presents: though I find people exceedingly eager to obtain them when I do; and if they will not buy them, it is a sign of such indifference, that I shall neither bestow my time, nor my cost, to no purpose. All I desire is, to pay the expenses, which I can afford much less than my idle moments. Not but the operations of my press have often turned against myself in many shapes. I have told people many things they did not know, and from fashion they have bought a thousand things out of my hands, which they do not understand, and only love en passant. At Mr. West's sale, I got literally nothing: his prints sold for the frantic sum of 1495l. 10s. Your and my good friend Mr. Gulston threw away above 2007. there.

I am not sorry Mr. Lort has recourse to the fountainhead: Mr. Pownall's system of Freemasonry is so absurd and groundless, that I am glad to be rid of intervention. I have seen the former once: he told me he was willing to sell his prints, as the value of them is so increased-for that very reason I did not want to purchase them.

Paul Sanby promised me ten days ago to shew Mr. Henshaw's engravings (which I received from Dr. Ewen) to Bartolozzi, and ask his terms, thinking he would delight in so very promising a scholar; but I have heard nothing since, and therefore fear there is no success. Let me, however, see the young man when he comes, and I will try if there is any other way of serving him.

What shall I say to you, dear Sir, about Dr. Prescot? or what shall I say to him? It hurts me not to be very civil, especially as any respect to my father's memory touches me much more than any attention to myself, which I cannot hold to be a quarter so well founded. Yet, how dare I write to a poor man, who may do, as I have lately seen done by a Scotch woman that wrote a play,' and printed Lord Chesterfield's

1 "Sir Harry Gaylove; or, Comedy in Embryo;" by Mrs. Jane Marshall. It was printed in Scotland by subscription, but not acted. In the preface, she complains bitterly of the managers of the three London theatres, for refusing her the advantages of representing her performance.-E.

and Lord Lyttelton's letters to her, as Testimonia Auctorum: I will therefore beg you to make my compliments and thanks to the master, and to make them as grateful as you please, provided I am dispensed with giving any certificate under my hand. You may plead my illness, which, though the fifth month ended yesterday, is far from being at an end. My relapses have been endless: I cannot yet walk a step: and a great cold has added an ague in my cheek, for which I am just going to begin the bark. The prospect for the rest of my days is gloomy. The case of my poor nephew still more deplorable: he arrived in town last night, and bore his journey tolerably but his head is in much more danger of not recovering than his health; though they give us hopes of both. But the evils of life are not good subjects for letters - why afflict one's friends? Why make common-place reflections? Adieu! Yours ever.

TO THE REV. WILLIAM MASON.1

March 2, 1773.

WHAT shall I say? How shall I thank you for the kind manner in which you submit your papers to my correction? But if you are friendly, I must be just. I am so far from being dissatisfied, that I must beg to shorten your pen, and in that respect only would I wish, with regard to myself, to alter your text. I am conscious that in the beginning of the differences between Gray and me, the fault was mine. I was young, too fond of my own diversions; nay, I do not doubt, too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation, as a prime minister's son, not to have been inattentive to the feelings of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged to me; of one, whom presumption and folly made me deem not very superior in parts, though I have since felt my infinite inferiority to him. I treated him insolently.

1 This and the following letter are from Mr. Mitford's valuable edition of Gray's Works. See vol. iv. pp. 216, 218.-E.

He loved me, and I did not think he did. I reproached him with the difference between us, when he acted from the conviction of knowing that he was my superior. I often disregarded his wish of seeing places, which I would not quit my own amusements to visit, though I offered to send him thither without me. Forgive me, if I say that his temper was not conciliating, at the same time that I confess to you, that he acted a most friendly part had I had the sense to take advantage of it. He freely told me my faults. I declared I did not desire to hear them, nor would correct them. You will not wonder, that with the dignity of his spirit, and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must have widened till we became incompatible.

After this confession, I fear you will think I fall short in the words I wish to have substituted for some of yours. If you think them inadequate to the state of the case, as I own they are, preserve this letter, and let some future Sir John Dalrymple produce it to load my memory; but I own I do not desire that any ambiguity should aid his invention to forge an account for me. If you would have no objection, I would propose your narrative should run thus, [Here follows a note, which is inserted verbatim in Mason's Life of Gray.'] and contain no more, till a more proper time shall come for publishing the truth, as I have stated it to you. While I am living, it is not pleasant to see my private disagreements discussed in magazines and newspapers.

TO THE REV. WILLIAM MASON.

Strawberry Hill, March 27, 1773.

I HAVE received your letter, dear Sir, your manuscript, and Gray's letters to me. Twenty things crowd upon my pen,

"In justice to the memory of so respectable a friend, Mr. Walpole enjoins me to charge himself with the chief blame in their quarrel ; confessing that more attention and complaisance, more deference to a warm friendship, superior judgment and prudence, might have prevented a rupture that gave such uneasiness to them both, and a lasting concern to the survivor; though, in the year 1744, a reconciliation was effected between them, by a lady who wished well to both parties."-E.

and justle, and press to be said. As I came here to-day for a little air, and to read you undisturbed, they shall all have a place in due time. But having so safe a conveyance for my thoughts, I must begin with the uppermost of them, the Heroic Epistle. I have read it so very often, that I have got it by heart; and, now I am master of all its beauties, I confess I like it infinitely better than I did, though I liked it infinitely before. There is more wit, ten times more delicacy of irony, as much poetry, and greater facility than and as in the Dunciad. But what signifies what I think? All the world thinks the same. No soul has, I have heard, guessed within an hundred miles. I catched at Anstey's name, and have, I believe, contributed to spread that notion. It has since been called Temple Luttrell's, and, to my infinite honour, mine; Lord swears he should think so, if I did not praise it so excessively. But now, my dear Sir, that you have tapped this mine of talent, and it runs so richly and easily, for Heaven's sake, and for England's sake, do not let it rest! You have a vein of irony, and satire, &c.

I am extremely pleased with the easy unaffected simplicity of your manuscript (Memoirs of Gray), and have found scarcely anything I could wish added, much less retrenched, unless the paragraph on Lord Bute,' which I don't think quite clearly expressed; and yet perhaps too clearly, while you wish to remain unknown as the author of the Heroic Epistle, since it might lead to suspicion. For as Gray asked for the place, and accepted it afterwards from the Duke of Grafton, it

This paragraph was suppressed.-E.

2 In March 1798, Mr. Matthias suggested, in the Pursuits of Literature, that Walpole's papers would possibly lead to the discovery of the author of the far-famed Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers. By Thomas Warton, the poet laureate, it was supposed to have been "written by Walpole, and buckrum'd by Mason;" and Mr. Croker, in a note to his edition of Boswell's Johnson, says of it, "there can be no doubt that it was the joint production of Mason and Walpole; Mason supplying the poetry and Walpole the points:" while the Quarterly Review, vol. xv. p. 385, observes, that "when it is remembered that no one then alive, with the same peculiar taste and the same political principles, could have written such poetry, we must either ascribe the Heroic Epistle to Mr. Mason, or suppose, very needlessly and improbably, that one person supplied the matter and another shaped it into verse: but, the personal insolence displayed in this poem to his Sovereign, which was

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