Chapter 89

Arlington Street, April 5, 1775. (page 132)

The least I can do, dear Sir, in gratitude for the cargo of prints I have received to-day from you, is to send you a medicine. A pair of bootikins will set out to-morrow morning in the machine that goes from the Queen's-head in Gray's-inn-lane. To be certain, you had better send for them where the machine inns, lest they should neglect delivering them at Milton. My not losing a moment shows my zeal; but if you can bear a little pain, I should not press you to use them. I have suffered so dreadfully, that I constantly wear them to diminish the stock of gout in my constitution; but as your fit is very slight, and will not last, and as you are pretty sure by its beginning so late, that you will never have much; and s the gout certainly carries off other complaints, had not you better endure a little, when it is rather a remedy than a disease? I do not desire to be entirely delivered from the gout, for all reformations do but make room for some new grievance: and in my opinion a disorder that requires no physician, is preferable to any that does. However, I have put relief in your power, and you will judge for yourself. You must tie them as tight as you can bear, the flannel next to the flesh; and, when you take them off, it should be in bed: rub your feet with a warm cloth, and put on warm stockings, for fear of catching cold while the pores are open. It would kill any body but me, who am of adamant, to walk out in the dew in winter in my slippers in half an hour after pulling off the bootikins. A physician sent me word, good-naturedly, that there was danger of catching cold after the bootikins, unless one was careful. I thanked him, but told him my precaution was, never taking any. All the winter I pass five days in a week without walking out, and sit often by the fireside till seven in the evening. When I do go out, whatever the weather is, I go with both glasses of the coach down, and so I do at midnight out of the hottest room. I have not had a single cold, however slight, these two years.

You are too candid in submitting at once to my defence of Mr. Mason. It is true I am more charmed with his book than I almost ever was with one. I find more people like the grave letters than those of humour, and some think the latter a little affected, which is as wrong a judgment as they could make; for Gray never wrote any thing easily but things of humour. Humour was his natural and original turn--and though from his childhood he was grave and reserved, his genius led him to see things ludicrously and satirically; and though his health and dissatisfaction gave him low spirits, his melancholy turn was much more affected than his pleasantry in writing. You knew him enough to know I am in the right-but the world in general always wants to be told how to think, as well as what to think. The print, I agree with you, though like, is a very disagreeable likeness, and the worst likeness of him. It gives the primness he had under constraint; and there is a blackness in the countenance which was like him only the last time I ever saw him, when I was much struck with it: and, though I did not apprehend him in danger, it left an impression on me that was uneasy, and almost prophetic of what I heard but too soon after leaving him. Wilson drew the picture under such impression, and I could not bear it in my room; Mr. Mason altered it a little, but Still it is not well, nor gives any idea of the determined virtues of his heart. It just serves to help the reader to an image of the person whose genius and integrity they must admire, if they are so happy as to have a taste for either.

The Peep into the Gardens at Twickenham is a silly little book, of which a few little copies were printed some years ago for presents, and which now sets up for itself as a vendible book. It is a most inaccurate, superficial, blundering account of Twickenham and other places, drawn up by a Jewess, who has married twice, and turned Christian, poetess, and authoress. She has printed her poems, too, and one complimentary copy of mine, which, in good breeding, I could not help Sending her in return for violent compliments in verse to me. I do not remember that hers were good; mine I know were very bad, and certainly never intended for the press.

I bought the first volume of Manchester, but could not read it; it was much too learned for me, and seemed rather an account of Babel than Manchester, I mean in point of antiquity.(207) To be sure, it is very kind in an author to promise one the history of a country town, and give one a circumstantial account of the antediluvian world into the bargain. But I am simple and ignorant, and desire no more than I pay for. And then for my progenitors, Noah and the Saxons, I have no curiosity about them. Bishop Lyttelton used to plague me to death about barrows, and tumuli, and Roman camps, and all those bumps in the ground that do not amount to a most imperfect ichnography; but, in good truth, I am content with all arts when perfected, nor inquire how ingeniously people contrive to do without them--and I care still less for remains of art that retain no vestiges of art. Mr. Bryant,)208) who is sublime in unknown knowledge, diverted me more, yet I have not finished his work, no more than he has. There is a great ingenuity in discovering all his history [though it has never been written] by etymologies. Nay, he convinced me that the Greeks had totally mistaken all they went to learn in Egypt, etc. by doing, as the French do still, judge wrong by the ear--but as I have been trying now and then for above forty years to learn something, I have not time to unlearn it all again, though I allow this our best sort of knowledge. If I should die when I am not clear in the History of the World below its first three thousand years, I should be at a sad loss on meeting with Homer and Hesiod, or any of those moderns in the Elysian fields, before I knew what I ought to think of them. Pray do not betray my ignorance: the reviewers and such literati have called me a learned and ingenious gentleman. I am sorry they ever heard my name, but don't let them know how irreverently I speak of the erudite, whom I dare to say they admire. These wasps, I suppose, will be very angry at the just contempt Mr. Gray had for them, and will, as insects do, attempt to sting, in hopes that their twelvepenny readers will suck a little venom from the momentary tumour they raise--but good night-and once more, thank you for the prints. Yours ever.

(207) "The History of Manchester," by John Whitaker, B. D. London, 1771-3-5. 2 vols. 4to. "We talked," says Boswell, "of antiquarian researches. Johnson. 'All that is really known Of the ancient state of Britain is contained in a few Pages. We can know no more than what the old writers have told us; Yet what large books we have upon it; the whole of which, excepting such parts as are taken from these old writers, is all a dream, such as Whitaker's Manchester.'" Life of Johnson, vol. vii. p. 189.-E.

(208) Jacob Bryan, the learned author of "A New System; or, n Analysis of Ancient Mythology," 4to. 1774-6, 3 vols.; and of many other works. His character was thus finely drawn, in 1796, by Mr. Matthias, in "The Pursuits of Literature:"--"No man of literature can pass by the name of Mr. Bryant without gratitude and reverence. He is a gentleman of attainments peculiar to himself, and of classical erudition without an equal in Europe. His whole life has been spent in laborious researches, and the most curious investigations. He has a youthful fancy and a playful wit; with the mind, and occasionally with the pen of a poet; and with an ease and simplicity of style aiming only at perspicuity, and, as I think, attaining it. He has lived to see his eightieth winter (and May he yet long live!) with the esteem of the wise and good; in honourable retirement from the cares of life; with a gentleness of manners, and a readiness and willingness of literary communication seldom found. He is admired and sought after by the young who are entering on a course of study, and revered, and often followed, by those who have completed it. Nomen in exemplum sero servabirnus evo!" Mr. Bryant died in 1804, in his eighty-ninth year, in consequence Of a wound on his Shin, occasioned by his foot slipping from a chair which he had stepped on to reach a book in his library-E.