was to his distinguished countryman in Buckinghamshire, of which we have a few details.
“July 28, 1789.—Went to Gregoriess, near Beaconsfield, the seat of Mr. Burke, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Wyndham, and Mr. Courtenay, and passed three days there very agreeably.
“As I walked out before breakfast with Mr. B., I proposed to him to revise and enlarge his admirable book on the Sublime and Beautiful, which the experience, reading, and observation of thirty years could not but enable him to improve considerably. But he said the train of his thoughts had gone another way, and the whole bent of his mind turned from such subjects; that he was much fitter for such speculations at the time he published that book (about 1758[1]) than now. Besides, he added, the subject was then new, but several writers have since gone over the same ground, Lord Kames and others. The subject he said had been long rolling in his thoughts before he wrote his book, he having been used from the time he was in college to speculate on the topics which form the subjects of it. He was six or seven years employed on it, and produced it when he was about 28 or 29 years old—a prodigious work for such a period of life.
“On Thursday, 30th, we went in the morning to
- ↑ It should be 1757. The anecdote had been communicated to me in substance many years ago.
butes—willing to exalt our common nature, untainted by those vices that drag them down to the level of the unprincipled and vulgar. Should the reader wish further details, he may turn to the Quarterly Review, No. 115, in the notice of Lord Wharncliffe’s volumes—written no doubt by the late Right Hon. J. W. Croker.
