2

ting out for Lisbon with Lord Kinnoul, and will proceed through Granada to Italy, with his friend Lord Strathmore;1 not the son, I believe, of that poor mad Lady Strathmore whom you remember at Florence. The latter is much commended; I don't know him: Mr. Pitt is not only a most ingenious young man, but a most amiable one: he has already acted in the most noble style—I don't mean that he took a quarter of Quebec, or invaded a bit of France, or has spoken in the House of Commons better than Demosthenes's nephew; but he has an odious father, and has insisted on glorious cuttings off of entails on himself, that his father's debts might be paid and his sisters provided for. My own lawyer,3 who knew nothing of my being acquainted with him, spoke to me of him in raptures - no small merit in a lawyer to comprehend virtue in cutting off an entail when it was not to cheat; but indeed this lawyer was recommended to me by your dear brother- no wonder he is honest. You will now conceive that a letter I have given Mr. Pitt is not a mere matter of form, but an earnest suit to you to know one you will like so much. I should indeed have given it him, were it only to furnish you with an opportunity of ingratiating yourself with Mr. Pitt's nephew: but I address him to your heart. Well! but I have heard of another honest lawyer! The famous Polly, Duchess of Bolton, is dead, having, after

great, but the little one, my acquaintance) is setting out on his travels. He goes with my Lord Kinnoul to Lisbon; then (by sea still) to Cales; then up the Guadalquiver to Seville and Cordova, and so perhaps to Toledo, but certainly to Grenada; and, after breathing the perfumed air of Andalusia, and contemplating the remains of Moorish magnificence, re-embarks at Gibraltar or Malaga, and sails to Genoa. Sure an extraordinary good way of passing a few winter months, and better than dragging through Holland, Germany, and Switzerland, to the same place." A copy of Mr. Thomas Pitt's manuscript Diary of his tour to Spain and Portugal is in the possession of Mr. Bentley, the proprietor of this Correspondence.-E.]

1 John Lyon, ninth Earl of Strathmore. He married in 1767 Miss Bowes, the great heiress, whose disgraceful adventures are so well known.-D.

Lady Strathmore, rushing between her husband and a gentleman, with whom he had quarrelled and was fighting, and trying to hold the former, the other stabbed him in her arms, on which she went mad, though not enough to be confined. 3 His name was Dagge. Miss Fenton, the first Polly of the Beggar's Opera. Charles Duke

a life of merit, relapsed into her Pollyhood. Two years ago, ill at Tunbridge, she picked up an Irish surgeon. When she was dying, this fellow sent for a lawyer to make her will, but the man, finding who was to be her heir, instead of her children, refused to draw it. The Court of Chancery did furnish one other, not quite so scrupulous, and her three sons have but a thousand pounds a-piece; the surgeon about nine thousand.

I think there is some glimmering of peace! God send the world some repose from its woes! The King of Prussia has writ to Belleisle to desire the King of France will make peace for him no injudicious step, as the distress of France will make them glad to oblige him. We have no other news, but that Lord George Sackville has at last obtained a courtmartial. I doubt much whether he will find his account in it. One thing I know I dislike-a German aid-de-camp is to be an evidence! Lord George has paid the highest compliment to Mr. Conway's virtue. Being told, as an unlucky circumstance for him, that Mr. Conway was to be one of his judges, (but it is not so,) he replied, there was no man in England he should so soon desire of that number. And it is no mere compliment, for Lord George has excepted against another of them—but he knew whatever provocation he may have given to Mr. Conway, whatever rivalship there has been between them, nothing could bias the integrity of the latter. There is going to be another court-martial on a mad Lord Charles Hay,' who has foolishly demanded it; but it will not occupy the attention of the world like Lord George's. There will soon be another trial of another sort on another madman, an Earl Ferrers, who has murdered his steward. He was separated by Parliament from his wife, a very pretty woman, whom he married with no fortune, for the most groundless barbarity, and now killed his steward for having been evidence for her; but his story and person are too wretched and

of Bolton took her off the stage, had children by her, and afterwards married her.

'Lord Charles Hay, brother of the Marquis of Tweedale.

despicable to give you the detail. He will be dignified by a solemn trial in Westminster-hall.

Don't you like the impertinence of the Dutch? They have lately had a mudquake, and giving themselves terra-firma airs, call it an earthquake! Don't you like much more our noble national charity? Above two thousand pounds has been raised in London alone, besides what is collected in the country, for the French prisoners, abandoned by their monarch. Must not it make the Romans blush in their Appianway, who dragged their prisoners in triumph? What adds to this benevolence is, that we cannot contribute to the subsistence of our own prisoners in France; they conceal where they keep them, and use them cruelly to make them enlist. We abound in great charities: the distress of war seems to heighten rather than diminish them. There is a new one, not quite so certain of its answering, erected for those wretched women, called abroad les filles repenties. I was there the other night, and fancied myself in a convent.

The Marquis of Rockingham and Earl Temple are to have the two vacant garters to-morrow. Adieu !

Arlington Street, 6th.

I am this minute come to town, and find yours of Jan. 12. Pray, my dear child, don't compliment me any more upon my learning; there is nobody so superficial. Except a little history, a little poetry, a little painting, and some divinity, I know nothing. How should I? I, who have always lived in the big busy world; who lie a-bed all the morning, calling it morning as long as you please; who sup in company; who have played at pharaoh half my life, and now at loo till two and three in the morning; who have always loved pleasure; haunted auctions-in short, who don't know so much astronomy as would carry me to Knightsbridge, nor more physic than a physician, nor in short anything that is called science. If it were not that I lay up a little provision in summer, like the ant, I should be as ignorant as all the people I live with. How I have laughed, when some of the magazines

have called me the learned gentleman! Pray don't be like the magazines.

I see by your letter that you despair of peace; I almost do: there is but a gruff sort of answer from the woman of Russia to-day in the papers; but how should there be peace? If we are victorious, what is the King of Prussia? Will the distress of France move the Queen of Hungary? When we do make peace, how few will it content! The war was made for America, but the peace will be made for Germany; and whatever geographers may pretend, Crown-point lies somewhere in Westphalia. Again adieu! I don't like your rheumatism, and much less your plague.

SIR,

TO THE REV. HENRY ZOUCH.

Strawberry Hill, February 4th, 1760.

I DEFERRED answering your last, as I was in hopes of being able to send you a sheet or two of my new work, but I find so many difficulties and so much darkness attending the beginning, that I can scarce say I have begun. I can only say, in general, that I do not propose to go further back than I have sure footing; that is, I shall commence with what Vertue had collected from our records, which, with regard to painting, do not date before Henry III.; and then from him there is a gap to Henry VII. I shall supply that with a little chronology of intervening paintings, though, hitherto, I can find none of the two first Edwards. From Henry VIII. there will be a regular succession of painters, short lives of whom I am enabled by Vertue's MSS. to write, and I shall connect them historically. I by no means mean to touch on foreign artists, unless they came over hither; but they are essential, for we had scarce any others tolerable. I propose to begin with the anecdotes of painting only, because, in that branch, my materials are by far most considerable. If I shall be able to publish this part, perhaps it may induce persons of curiosity and knowledge to assist me in the darker parts of

the story, touching our architects, statuaries, and engravers. But it is from the same kind friendship which has assisted me so liberally already, that I expect to draw most information; need I specify, Sir, that I mean yours, when the various hints in your last letter speak so plainly for me?

It is a pleasure to have anybody one esteems agree with one's own sentiments, as you do strongly with mine about Mr. Hurd. It is impossible not to own that he has sense and great knowledge-but sure he is a most disagreeable writer! He loads his thoughts with so many words, and those couched in so hard a style, and so void of all veracity, that I have no patience to read him. In one point, in the dialogues you mention, he is perfectly ridiculous. He takes infinite pains to make the world believe, upon his word, that they are the genuine productions of the speakers, and yet does not give himself the least trouble to counterfeit the style of any one of them. What was so easy as to imitate Burnet? In his other work, the notes on Horace, he is still more absurd. He cries up Warburton's preposterous notes on Shakspeare, which would have died of their own folly, though Mr. Edwards had not put them to death with the keenest wit in the world. But what signifies any sense, when it takes Warburton for a pattern, who, with much greater parts, has not been able to save himself from, or rather has affectedly involved himself in, numberless absurdities? - who proved Moses's legation by the sixth book of Virgil; - a miracle (Julian's Earthquake), by proving it was none; — and who explained a recent poet (Pope) by metaphysical notes, ten times more obscure than the text! As if writing were come to perfection, Warburton and Hurd are going back again; and since commentators, obscurity, paradoxes, and visions have been so long exploded, aye, and pedantry too, they seem to think that they shall have merit by reviving what was happily forgotten; and yet these men have their followers, by

1 Who died Bishop of Worcester in 1808. He was the author of many works, most of which are now little read, although they had a great vogue in their day. There is a great deal of justice in Mr. Walpole's criticism of him and his patron.-C.

2

"In the "Canons of Criticism."-E.