Mr. Locke; I need proceed no farther-for mine can have no chance to be true, if his is still supposed to be the only true one; and I shall very willingly give up the pursuit: but if I have demolished his scheme, I have so far cleared the way to make room for my own; and, in that case, I have one or two points to consult you about. Lam,

J. TUCKER.

LII.

To Lord Althorpe.

Temple, Oct. 13, 1776. My dear lord, captain, and friend (of all which titles no man entertains a juster idea than yourself), how shall I express the delight which your letter from Warley camp has given me? I cannot sufficiently regret, that I was so long deprived of that pleasure; for, intending to be in London soon after the circuit, I had neglected to leave any directions here about my letters; so that yours has lain almost a month upon my table, where I found it yesterday, on my return from the country. I ought indeed to have written first to you, because I was a rambler, you stationary; and because the pen has been my

peculiar instrument, as the sword has been yours this summer: but the agitation of forensic business, and the sort of society in which I have been forced to live, afforded me few moments of leisure, except those in which nature calls for perfect repose; and the spirits, exhausted with fatigue, require immediate reparation. I rejoice to see that you are a votary, as Archilochus says of himself, both of the Muses and of Mars; nor do I believe that a letter, full of more manly sentiments, or written with more unaffected elegance, than yours, has often been sent from a camp. You know I have set my mind on your being a fine speaker in the next parliament, in the cause of true constitutional liberty; and your. letters convince me that I shall not be disappointed. To this great object, both for your own glory and your country's good, your present military station will contribute not a little; for a soldier's life naturally inspires a certain spirit and confidence, without which the finest elocution will not have a full effect. Not to mention Pericles, Xenophon, Cæsar, and a hundred other eloquent soldiers among the ancients, I am persuaded that Pitt (whom, by the way, I am far from comparing to Pericles) acquired his forcible manner in the field where he carried the colours. This I mention, in addition to the advantages of your present situation, which you very justly point out: nor can I think your summer in any respect uselessly spent, since our constitution has a good defence in a well regulated militia, officered by men who love their country; and a militia so regulated, may, in due time, be the means of thinning the formidable standing army, if not of extinguishing it. Captain **** is one of the

worthiest, as well as tallest men in the kingdom; but he and his Socrates (Dr. Johnson) have such prejudices in politics, that one must be upon one's guard in their company, if one wishes to preserve their good opinion. By the way, the dean of Gloucester has printed a work, which he thinks a full confutation of Locke's Theory of Government; and his second volume will contain a new theory of his own of this, when we meet. The disappointment to which you allude, and concerning which you say so many friendly things to me, is not yet certain. My competitor is not yet nominated; many doubt whether he will be; I think he will not, unless the chancellor should press it strongly. It is still the opinion and wish of the bar, that I should be the man. I believe the minister hardly knows his own mind. I cannot legally be appointed till January, or next month at soonest, because I am not a barrister of five years' standing till that time: now, many believe that they keep the place open for me till I am qualified. I certainly wish to have it, because I wish to have twenty thousand pounds in my pocket before I am eight-aud-thirty years old; and then I might contribute,in some little degree,towards the service of my country in parliament, as well as at the bar, without selling my liberty to a patron, as too many of my profession are not ashamed of doing and I might be a speaker in the house of commous in the full vigour and maturity of my age; whereas, in the slow career of Westminster Hall, I should not, perhaps, even with the best success, acquire the same independent station, till the age at which Cicero was killed. But be assured, my dear lord, that if the minister be offended at the

style in which I have spoken, do speak, and will speak, of public affairs, and, on that account, should refuse to give me the judgeship, I shall not be at all mortified, having already a very decent competence, without a debt or a care of any kind. I will not break in upon you at Warley unexpectedly; but whenever you find it most convenient, let me know, and I will be with you in less than two hours.

SIR,

LIII.

From Adam Prince Czartoryski.

Warsaw, Nov. 26, 1778.

It is the fate of those who, like you, are an ornament to the literary world, to be known to those who are perfectly unknown to them: each is entitled to call to them for light; and this I hope will be a sufficient apology for my intruding upon you, and interrupting those studious hours which you consecrate with so much success to the instruction of your readers.

I was happy enough of late to hit upon your Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, and your History of the Persian Language. I found that you had made up, in these two works, a quarrel of a very old standing between erudition and taste: you have

brought them to meet together in such a friendly manner, that one who had never read but your writings, would be apt to think they always went hand in hand.

I have been applying myself since a few years to the study of Eastern languages; though I cannot flatter myself with having made as yet any considerable progress in that branch of learning. Your most excellent Grammar of the Persian Language, which gave birth to Mr. Richardson's one of the Arabic, executed upon the same plan, are the agreeable guides which I follow in that difficult journey to them I owe to be rescued out of the hands of Erpenius, Guadagnola, and the rest of those unmerciful gentlemen who never took the least trouble about clearing the road, or plucking out one single thorn from the many with which the paths of, the study of Eastern languages are covered. Give me leave to be still more beholden to you and as you learned men are the leading stars of the unlearned, I beg you will bestow a few moments of your leisure upon answering some questions which may perhaps appear very trifling in the eyes of a man of your extensive knowledge.

I have always been at a loss to form any conjecture upon the following subject; which is, by what chance so many words from other European languages, or at least used in our European languages, are got into the Persian; as, for instance, jivân, pudder, måder, * the English, bad, the German, dochter, der, bend, together with a deal of our Sclavonian, especially in the arithmetical

• Youth, father, mother.