Chapter 58

July 6, 1773, (page 84)

Sir, I am so much engaged in private business at present, that I have not had time to thank you for the favour of your letter: nor can I now answer it to your satisfaction. My life has been too insignificant to afford materials interesting to the public. In general, the lives of mere authors are dry and unentertaining; nor, though I -have been one occasionally, are my writings of a class or merit to entitle me to any distinction. I can as little furnish you, Sir, with a list of them or their dates, which would give me more trouble to make out than is worth while. If I have any merit with the public, it is for printing and preserving some valuable works of others; and if ever you write the lives of printers, I may be enrolled in the number. My own works, I suppose, are dead and buried; but, as I am not impatient to be interred with them, I hope you will leave that office to the parson of the parish, and I shall be, as long as I live, yours, etc.

(99) Dr. John Berkenhout had been a captain both in the English and Prussian service, and in 1765 took his degree of MD. at Leyden. his application to Walpole was for the purpose of procuring materials for a life of him In his forthcoming work, "Biographia Literaria, or a Biographical History of Literature; containing the Lives of English, Irish, and Scottish Authors, from the dawn of Letters in these Kingdoms to the present Time." The first volume, which treats of those writers who lived from the beginning of the fifth to the end of the sixth century, and which is the only one ever published, appeared in 1777. He died in 1791-E.