some of your frolics with Robin Cursemother, and some of Miss Marjoram's bon-mots.

P. S. Dr. Middleton called on me yesterday: he is come to town to consult his physician for a jaundice and swelled legs, symptoms which, the doctor tells him, and which he believes, can be easily cured: I think him visibly broke, and near his end. He lately advised me to marry, on the sense of his own happiness; but if any body had advised him to the contrary, at his time of life, I believe he would not have broke so soon.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Arlington Street, July 25, 1750.

I TOLD you my idle season was coming on, and that I should have great intervals between my letters; have not I kept my word? For any thing I have to tell you, I might have kept it a month longer. I came out of Essex last night, and find the town quite depopulated: I leave it to-morrow, and go to Mr. Conway's, in Buckinghamshire, with only giving a transient glance on Strawberry Hill. imagine I am grown fickle; I thrust all my visits into a heap, and then am quiet for the rest of the season. It is so much the way in England to jaunt about, that one can't avoid it; but it convinces me that people are more tired of themselves and the country than they

care to own.

Don't

Has your brother told you that my Lord Chesterfield has bought the Houghton lantern? the famous lantern, that produced so much patriot wit; and very likely some of his lordship's? My brother had bought a much handsomer at Lord Cholmondeley's sale; for, with all the immensity of the celebrated one, it was ugly, and too little for the hall. He would have given it to Lord Chesterfield rather than he should not have had it.

You tell us nothing of your big events, of the quarrel of the Pope and the Venetians, on the Patriarchate of Aquileia. We look upon

a

Warburton, in a letter to Hurd, of the 11th of July, says, "I hear Dr. Middleton has been lately in London, (I suppose, to consult Dr. Heberden about his health,) and is returned in an extreme had condition. The scribblers against him will say they have killed him; but by what Mr. Yorke told me, his bricklayer will dispute the honour of his death with them."-E.

The Doctor had recently taken a third wife, the relict of a Bristol merchant. On making her a matrimonial visit, Bishop Gooch told Mrs. Middleton that "he was glad she did not dislike the Ancients so much as her husband did." She replied, "that she hoped his lordship did not reckon her husband among the Ancients yet." The Bishop answered, "You, Madam, are the best judge of that." Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. v. p. 422.-E.

Mr. Conway had hired Latimers, in Buckinghamshire, for three years.

In one pamphlet, the noise of this lantern was so exaggerated, that the author said, on a journey to Houghton, he was first carried into a glass-room, which he supposed was the porter's lodge, but proved to be the lantern. [This lantern, which hung from the ceiling of the hall, was for eighteen candles, and of copper gilt. It was the Craftsman which made so much noise about it.]

it as so decisive that I should not wonder if Mr. Lyttelton, or Whitfield the Methodist, were to set out for Venice, to make them a tender of some of our religions.

Is it true too what we hear, that the Emperor has turned the tables on her Cæsarean jealousy, and discarded Metastasio the poet, and that the latter is gone mad upon it, instead of hugging himself on coming off so much better than his predecessor in royal love and music, David Rizzio? I believe I told you that one of your sovereigns, and an intimate friend of yours, King Theodore, is in the King's Bench prison. I have so little to say, that I don't care if I do tell you the same thing twice. He lived in a privileged place; his creditors seized him by making him believe Lord Granville wanted him on business of importance; he bit at it, and concluded they were both to be reinstated at once. I have desired Hogarth to go and steal his picture for me; though I suppose one might easily buy a sitting of him. The King of Portugal (and when I have told you this, I have done with kings) has bought a handsome house here for the residence of his ministers.

I believe you have often heard me mention a Mr. Ashton, a clergyman, who, in one word, has great preferments, and owes every thing upon earth to me. I have long had reason to complain of his behaviour; in short, my father is dead, and I can make no bishops. He has at last quite thrown off the mask, and in the most direct manner, against my will, has written against my friend Dr. Middleton,d taking for his motto these lines,

"Nullius addictus jurare in verba Magistri,

Quid verum atque decens curo et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum."

I have forbid him my house, and wrote this paraphrase upon his picture,

"Nullius addictus munus meminisse Patroni,

Quid vacat et qui dat, curo et rogo, et omnis in hoc sum."

I own it was pleasant to me the other day, on meeting Mr. Tonson, his bookseller, at the Speaker's, and asking him if he had sold many of Mr. Ashton's books, to be told, " Very few indeed, Sir!"

I beg you will thank Dr. Cocchi much for his book; I will thank him much more when I have received and read it. His friend, Dr. Mead, is undone; his fine collection is going to be sold: he owes about

a The Empress Maria Theresa, who was very jealous, and with reason, of her husband, the Emperor Francis.-D.

b In South Audley Street. (It continued to be the residence of the Portuguese ambassadors till the year 1831.-D.)

c Thomas Ashton, fellow of Eton College, and rector of St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate. d Dr. Conyers Middleton, author of the Life of Cicero. [The Doctor died three days after the date of this letter, in his sixty-seventh year.]

five-and-twenty thousand pounds. All the world thought him immensely rich; but, besides the expense of his collection, he kept a table for which alone he is said to have allowed seventy pounds a-week.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Strawberry Hill, August 2, 1750.

I HAD just sent my letter to the Secretary's office the other day, when I received yours: it would have prevented my reproving you for not mentioning the quarrel between the Pope and the Venetians; and I should have had time to tell you that Dr. Mead's bankruptcy is contradicted. I don't love to send you falsities, so I tell you this is contradicted, though it is by no means clear that he is not undone— he is scarce worth making an article in two letters.

I don't wonder that Marquis Acciaudi's villa did not answer to you: by what I saw in Tuscany, and by the prints, their villas are strangely out of taste, and laboured by their unnatural regularity and art to destroy the romanticness of the situations. I wish you could see the villas and seats here! the country wears a new face; every body is improving their places, and as they don't fortify their plantations with intrenchments of walls and high hedges, one has the benefit of them even in passing by. The dispersed buildings, I mean temples, bridges, &c. are generally Gothic or Chinese, and give a whimsical air of novelty that is very pleasing. You would like a drawing-room in the latter style that I fancied and have been executing at Mr. Rigby's, in Essex; it has large and very fine Indian landscapes, with a black fret round them, and round the whole entablature of the room, and all the ground or hanging is of pink paper. While I was there, we had eight of the hottest days that ever were felt; they say, some degrees beyond the hottest in the East Indies, and that the Thames was more so than the hot well at Bristol. The guards died on their posts at Versailles; and here a Captain Halyburton, brother-in-law of Lord Morton went mad with the excess of it.

Your brother Gal. will, I suppose, be soon making improvements like the rest of the world: he has bought an estate in Kent, called Bocton Malherbe, famous enough for having belonged to two men who, in my opinion, have very little title to fame, Sir Harry Wotton and my Lord Chesterfield. I must have the pleasure of being the first to tell you that your pedigree is finished at last; a most magnificent performance, and that will make a pompous figure in a future great hall at Bocton Malherbe, when your great nephews or greatgrandchildren shall be Earls, &c. My cousin Lord Conway is made Earl of Hertford, as a branch of the Somersets: Sir Edward Seymour gave his approbation handsomely. He has not yet got the dukedom himself, as there is started up a Dr. Seymour who claims it, but will be able to make nothing out.

Dr. Middleton is dead-not killed by Mr. Ashton-but of a decay

that came upon him at once. The Bishop of London' will perhaps make a jubilee for his death, and then we shall draw off some of your crowds of travellers. Tacitus Gordon died the same day; he married the widow of Trenchardd (with whom he wrote Cato's letters,) at the same time that Dr. Middleton married her companion. The Bishop of Durham (Chandler), another great writer of controversy, is dead too, immensely rich; he is succeeded by Butler of Bristol, a metaphysic author, much patronized by the late Queen; she never could make my father read his book, and which she certainly did not understand herself: he told her his religion was fixed, and that he did not want to change or improve it. A report is come of the death of the King of Portugal, and of the young Pretender; but that I don't believe.

I have been in town for a day or two, and heard no conversation but about M'Lean, a fashionable highwayman, who is just taken, and who robbed me among others; as Lord Eglinton, Sir Thomas Robinson, of Vienna, Mrs. Talbot, &c. He took an odd booty from the Scotch Earl, a blunderbuss, which lies very formidably upon the justice's table. He was taken by selling a laced waistcoat to a pawnbroker, who happened to carry it to the very man who had just sold the lace. His history is very particular, for he confesses every thing, and is so little of a hero that he cries and begs, and I believe, if Lord Eglinton had been in any luck, might have been robbed of his own blunderbuss. His father was an Irish Dean; his brother is a Calvinist minister in great esteem at the Hague. He himself was a grocer, but losing a wife that he loved extremely about two years ago, and by whom he has one little girl, he quitted his business with two hundred pounds in his pocket, which he soon spent, and then took to the road with only one companion, Plunket, a journeyman apothecary, my other friend, whom he has impeached, but who is not taken. M'Lean had a lodging in St. James's Street, over against White's, and

Thomas Sherlock, translated from the see of Salisbury in 1748. He died in 1761.-D. b This alludes to the supposed want of orthodoxy shown by Dr. Middleton in some of his theological writings.-D.

Thomas Gordon, the translator of Sallust and Tacitus; and also a political writer of his day, of considerable notoriety. His death happening at the same time as that of Dr. Middleton, Lord Bolingbroke said to Dr. Heberden, "then there is the best writer in England gone, and the worst."-E.

d John Trenchard, son of Sir John Trenchard, secretary of state to King William the Third, was born in 1669. He wrote various political pamphlets of a democratic cast. In 1720 he published, in conjunction with Thomas Gordon, a series of political letters, under the signature of "Cato." They appeared at first in the "London Journal," and afterwards in the "British Journal," two newspapers of the day. They obtained great cele. brity, as well from the merit of their composition, as from the boldness of the principles they advocated. These consisted in an uncompromising hostility to the Government and to the Church. Trenchard was member of parliament for Taunton, and died in 1723.-D. * Edward Chandler, a learned prelate, and author of various polemical works. He had been raised to the see of Durham in 1730, as it was then said, by simoniacal means.-D. f Joseph Butler, the learned and able author of "The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Cause of Nature." This is the " Book," here alluded to, of which Queen Caroline was so fond that she made the fortune of its author. Bishop Butler died much regretted in 1752.—D.

another at Chelsea; Plunket one in Jermyn Street; and their faces are as known about St. James's as any gentleman's who lives in that quarter, and who perhaps goes upon the road too. M'Lean had a quarrel at Putney bowling-green two months ago with an officer, whom he challenged for disputing his rank; but the captain declined, till M'Lean should produce a certificate of his nobility, which he has just received. If he had escaped a month longer, he might have heard of Mr. Chute's genealogic expertness, and come hither to the college of Arms for a certificate. There was a wardrobe of clothes, three-and-twenty purses, and the celebrated blunderbuss found at his lodgings, besides a famous kept mistress. As I conclude he will suffer, and wish him no ill, I don't care to have his idea, and am almost single in not having been to see him. Lord Mountford, at the head of half White's, went the first day: his aunt was crying over him: as soon as they were withdrawn, she said to him, knowing they were of White's," My dear, what did the lords say to you? Have you ever been concerned with any of them?"-Was not it admirable? what a favourable idea people must have of White's!-and what if White's should not deserve a much better! But the chief personages who have been to comfort and weep over this fallen hero are Lady Caroline Petersham and Miss Ashe: I call them Polly and Lucy, and asked them if he did not sing

"Thus I stand like the Turk with his doxies around."

Another celebrated Polly has been arrested for thirty pounds, even the old Cuzzoni. The prince of Wales bailed her-who will do as much for him?

I am much obliged to you for your intended civilities to my liking Madame Capello; but as I never liked any thing of her, but her prettiness, for she is an idiot, I beg you will dispense with them on my account: I should even be against your renewing your garden assemblies: you would be too good to pardon the impertinence of the Florentines, and would very likely expose yourself to more: besides, the absurdities which English travelling boys are capable of, and likely to act or conceive, always gave me apprehensions of your meeting with disagreeable scenes—and then there is another animal still more absurd than Florentine men or English boys, and that is, travelling governors, who are mischievous into the bargain, and whose pride is always hurt because they are sure of its never being indulged. They will not learn the world, because they are sent to teach it, and as they come forth more ignorant of it than their pupils, take care to return with more prejudices, and as much care to instil all theirs into their pupils. Don't assemble them!

Since I began my letter, the King of Portugal's death is contradicted for the future, I will be as circumspect as one of your Tuscan

The last song in the Beggar's Opera.

b A celebrated Italian singer.-D.