called it any thing rather than a Pindaric. town is an owl, if it don't like Lady Mary, and I am surprised at it: we here are owls enough to think her eclogues+ very bad; but that I did not wonder at. Our present taste is Sir T. Fitz-Osborne's Letters.

I send you a bit of a thing for two reasons; first, because it is of one of your favourites, Mr. M. Green: and next, because I would do justice. The thought on which my second Odet turns is manifestly stole from hence; not that I knew it at the time, but having seen this many years before, to be sure it imprinted itself on my memory, and, forgetting the Author, I took it for my own. The subject was the Queen's Hermitage.

dow 102 bow Nov. Tuesday, Cambridge. IT is a misfortune to me to be at a distance from both of you at once. A letter can give one so ittle idea of such matters, *** I always beieved well of his heart and temper, and would gladly lo so still. If they are as they should be, I should have expected every thing from such an explanation; For it is a tenet with me (a simple one, you'll peraps say) that if ever two people, who love one anoher, come to breaking, it is for want of a timely claircissement, a full and precise one, without witesses or mediators, and without reserving any one

disagreeable circumstance for the mind to brood upon in silence.

I am not totally of your mind as to Mr. Lyttleton's elegy, though I love kids and fawns as little as you do. If it were all like the fourth stanza, I should be excessively pleased. Nature and sorrow, and tenderness, are the true genius of such things; and something of these I find in several parts of it (not in the orange-tree :) poetical ornaments, are foreign to the purpose; for they only show a man is not sorry; and devotion worse; for it teaches him that he ought not to be sorry, which is all the pleasure of the thing. I beg leave to turn your weathercock the contrary way. Your epistle* I have not seen a great while, and Doctor M- is not in the way to give me a sight of it: but I remember enough to be sure all the world will be pleased with it, even with all its faults upon its head, if you don't care to mend them. I would try to do it myself, (however hazardous) rather than it should remain unpublished. As to my Eton ode, Mr. Dodsley is padrone. The second† you had, I suppose you do not think worth giving him: otherwise, to me it seems not worse than the former. He might have Selima too, unless she be of too

THIS comes du fond de ma cellule to salute Mr. H. W. not so much him that visits and votes, and goes to White's and to Court, as the H. W. in his rural capacity, snug in his tub on Windsor-hill, and brooding over folios of his own creation : him that can slip away, like a pregnant beauty, (but a little oftener,) into the country, be brought to bed perhaps of twins, and whisk to town again the week after, with a face as if nothing had happened. Among the little folks, my godsons and daughters, I cannot choose but enquire more particularly after the health of one; I mean (without a figure) the Memoires: Do they grow? Do they unite, and hold up their heads, and dress themselves? Do they begin to think of making their appearance in the world, that is to say, fifty years hence, to make posterity stare, and all good people cross themselves? Has Asheton (who will then be Lord Bishop of Killaloe, and is to publish them) thought of n aviso all' lettore to prefix to them yet, import