lerably late. The other day at Mrs. Chapone's none of the party but ourselves was come at a quarter before eight; and the first lady that arrived said she hurried away from dinner without waiting for the coffee. There goes a story of the Duchess of D, that she said to a tradesman "Call on me to-morrow morning at four o'clock"; and that the honest man, not being aware of the extent of the term morning, knocked the family up some hours before daybreak. Last week we met the American bishops at Mr. V.'s,-if bishops they may be called, without title, without revenue, without diocese, and without lawn sleeves. I wonder our bishops will consecrate them, for they have made very free with the Common Prayer, and have left out two creeds out of three. deed, as to the Athanasian creed, the King has forbidden it in his chapel, so that will soon fall.

In

I have been much pleased with the poems of the Scottish ploughman, of which you have had specimens in the Review. His Cotter's Saturday Night has much of the same kind of merit as the School-mistress; and the Daisy, and the Mouse, which I believe you have had in the papers, I think are charming. The endearing diminutives, and the Doric rusticity of the dialect, suit such subjects extremely. This is the age for self-taught genius a subscription has been raised for a pipemaker of Bristol, who has been discovered to have

a poetic turn; and they have transplanted him to London, where they have taken him a little shop, which probably will be frequented at first and then deserted. A more extraordinary instance is that of a common carpenter at Aberdeen, who applied to the professors to be received in the lowest mathematical class: they examined him, and found he was much beyond it; then for the next, and so on, till they found he had taught himself all they could teach him; and instead of receiving him as a student, they gave him a degree.

Miss Bowdler's Essays are read here by the graver sort with much approbation. She is the lady who betook herself to writing upon having lost her voice; but above all, the Political State for 17.87 is read by everybody. The Eaton boys. have published a periodical paper among themselves, which they say is clever. Dr. Price has a letter from Mr. Howard, dated Amsterdam; he says the Emperor gave him a long audience. A pasquinade was fixed upon the gate of the lunatic hospital at Vienna. "Josephus, ubicunque secundus, hic primus."—And now, after this idle chitchat, good part of which I have written while my hair was dressing, let me tell you I long to hear from you, and to hear you are well; and so, with Mr. B.'s and Charles's love to all, I bid you adieu.

Hampstead, Sept. 5, 1787. I AM very glad to be informed what is the proper method to engage you to write verses, and should inclose herewith an order for a score or two of lines, if I thought the command were certain to be as efficacious as the lovely Anna's.

The generous Muse, whom harsh constraint offends,

At Anna's call with ready homage bends;

Well may she claim, who gives poetic fire,

For what her lips command, her eyes inspire. ·

Come va l'Italiano? I have read a volume of Goldoni's Plays; which are not all worked up to superior excellence, as you may suppose, since he wrote sixteen in a season. Two are taken from Pamela; but he has spoiled the story by making Pamela turn out to be the daughter of an attainted Scotch peer, without which salvo for family pride he did not dare to make her lover marry her. Goldoni's great aim seems to have been to introduce what he calls comedies of character, instead of the pantomime, and the continual exhibition of harlequin and his cortége, which was supported only by the extempore wit of the actors. There is in his Teatro Comico a critique which puts me much in mind of Shakespear's instructions to the players. It abounds with good sense, which, and a desire to promote good manners, seem in what I have read to be his characteristics. I find by

him that the prompter repeats the whole play before the actors.

Our plot begins to thicken; assays. We have taken into our family for six months, and perhaps longer, a young Spaniard who comes solely to learn English. We dined with the young man, his uncle, and another Spaniard, who is secretary to the ambassador, at Mr. W's, where there was a great mixture of languages. The secretary, as well as French and Spanish, spoke English very well; the young man, Spanish and French; and the uncle, though he had been several years in England, only Spanish. As Mr. W. had told us they were strict Catholics, we expressed a fear lest we should not be able to provide for the youth agreeably on fast days: but he said, "Tout jour est jour gras pour moi:" to which the uncle learnedly added,-that it was not what went into the mouth, but what came out of it, that defileth. As far as we have yet seen (but he has been with us only two days), we find him very well behaved and easy in the family; but the great difficulty is to entertain him: he is quite a man, of one- or two-and-twenty, and rather looks like a Dutchman than a Spaniard. Did you ever see seguars--leaf-tobacco rolled up of the length of one's finger, which they light and smoke without a pipe?-he uses them. "And how does Mr. B. bear that?" say you: O, he keeps it snug

in his room. I would not advise the boys to imitate his accent in French, for he pronounces it with a deep guttural: I fancy he would speak Welsh well.

It gave me very great pleasure the other day to see my father's old friend Dr. Pulteney, whom Dr. Garthshore brought to us. It is a strange and mixt emotion, however, which one feels at sight of a person one has not seen for twenty years or more. The alteration such a space of time makes in both parties, at first gives a kind of shock; it is your friend, but your friend disguised.

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We are making a catalogue of our books; and I have left a great deal of space under the letters A. and B. for our future publications.

Hampstead, Feb. 1788.

WE are waiting with great impatience for two things, your book and my sister,-your child and your wife, that is to say.....

I have been reading an old book, which has given me a vast deal of entertainment,-Father Herodotus, the father of history; and the father of lies too, his enemies might say. I take it for granted the original has many more beauties than Littlebury's humble translation, which I have been perusing but at any rate, a translation of an ori