fulfilled its functions otherwise; and wasting of the frame, without material pain, ensued. Still his studies were but slightly intermitted. What he had once done he aimed to improve, when and wherever the opportunity offered. The following note, written in the spring of the year respecting some letters of Dryden kindly procured for him by a member of the Royal family, displays the pains he took in not merely accomplishing an object, but in doing it so completely that there should be as little room as possible for future improvement.
“Mr. Malone presents his compliments to Lady Ailesbury, and requests that her ladyship will accept his sincere thanks for the copies of Dryden’s letters and Lord Chesterfield’s answers, which she has had the goodness to transmit to him, and which he should have acknowledged some days, but that he has been since Friday last much out of order. He is extremely concerned to find that Lady Ailesbury has had so much trouble in obtaining these papers. Indeed, had he conceived that this could possibly have been the case, he hardly would have ventured to solicit her ladyship to undertake so difficult a negotiation.
“Were he master of those happy turns of expression for which his author was so justly celebrated, he might perhaps have endeavoured to express his sense of the goodness of her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth in taking so much concern in this matter. Without, however, any pretensions of that kind, he trusts he may be permitted to say that her Royal Highness’s condescension in exerting
