I rejoice to hear you have so many things on the anvil; every one of them is a resource against ennui—of all human maladies the worst, since all other diseases affect the mind through the body, while this pest of our nature seems to originate in the soul. Your Life of Shakspeare will, I am confident, be curious, and, as that more immediately belongs to you, I think you are in the right to give it the preference of (to) Aubrey, I know nothing of particulars, but am really impatient for Dryden’s Prose, as I regard his style as one of the first in our language, and wish that it were more read and imitated than it has been.
As to my dear Sir Joshua’s works, I more than long for them, not only on account of their intrinsic merit, but because I was and am, in spite of fate, his friend.
Poor Burke! I never, indeed, expected that he would get the better of his loss,[1] and am happy to find that, at times, he can forget it. There was a man whose spirit seemed to be almost independent of body, though even he is weighed down by bodily infirmities. Yet his mind, too, must suffer greatly from the present torrent of French success; and I hear that his Regicide Peace is suppressed, since no publication could assuredly be worse timed.[2]
The death of Lord Orford, which, from your account, I cannot but fear, will greatly grieve me. As an old and kind friend, I shall most sincerely lament him. As a literary character, I must deplore a loss to the world which will be scarcely retrievable, since such a union of the scholar and the gentleman will with difficulty be found.
Why must Lord Macartney, spite of ill health and increasing years, be for ever, like Cain, sentenced to be a wanderer, after all his peregrinations of Europe, Asia, and America? Why must he be condemned to leave his bones perhaps in Africa, among Hottentots?[3] Indeed, his English- ↑ That of his son, and only remaining child.
- ↑ This proved to be unfounded. Few who knew Burke would believe its suppression; but his lordship’s politics were strong the other way.
- ↑ His lordship, who mingled much in literary and fashionable coteries, and to whom I find several references by Malone, had been recently appointed Governor of the Cape of Good Hope.
