the scaffold, and helped up one of their friends to drink with them, as he was still hanging, which he did for above an hour, and then was conveyed back with the same pomp to Surgeons' Hall, to be dissected. The executioners fought for the rope, and the one who lost it cried. The mob tore off the black cloth as relics; but the universal crowd behaved with great decency and admiration, as they well might; for sure no exit was ever made with more sensible resolution and with less ostentation.

If I have tired you by this long narrative, you feel differently from me. The man, the manners of the country, the justice of so great and curious a nation, all to me seem striking, and must, I believe, do more so to you, who have been absent long enough to read of your own country as history.

I have run into so much paper, that I am ashamed at going on, but, having a bit left, I must say a few more words. The other prisoner, from whom the mob had promised themselves more entertainment, is gone into the country, having been forbid the court, with some barbarous additions to the sentence, as you will see in the papers. It was notified, too, to the second court, who have had the prudence to countenance him no longer. The third prisoner, and second madman, Lord Charles Hay, is luckily dead, and has saved much trouble.

1

Have you seen the works of the philosopher of Sans Souci, or rather of the man who is no philosopher, and who has 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

The Prince of Wales's.

"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.

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, "consider, if your administration lasts, the national debt will soon be two hundred millions." Good night for a twelvemonth!

SIR,

TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.3

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.*

I have lately bought, intending it for Dr. Robertson, a Spanish MS. called "Annales del Emperador Carlos V. Autor, Francisco Lopez de Gornara." As I am utterly ig

1 Strange was a confirmed Jacobite. ? The residence of the Pretender.

3 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 Mac

norant 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.

pherson, 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 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 made many enquiries, and have lately procured a letter from Mr. David Hume, the historian, which is more satisfactory than anything I have yet met with on that subject. He says, 'Certain it is, that these poems are in everybody'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.

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 have with much ado extorted from him. I pray to Sir Isaac Newton that the machine may answer: it costs, the stars know what! The 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 as 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 anything 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 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

The following verses are said to have been found in Lord Ferrers's apartment in the Tower:

"In doubt I lived, in doubt I die,

Yet stand prepared the vast abyss to try,
And undismay'd expect eternity!"-E.

2 Dr. Edmund Keene, brother of Sir Benjamin, and afterwards Bishop of Ely.