~ iol 1345 J6863 My piss 7 et ee wie : nee Cornell Mniversity Library BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Henry W. Sage 1891 AMO... AY IGOO. _ aie 1354. g] WV13 yore na col HJ 1 Cornell University Library EA 1345.J68E3 y letters, wi | LighteentheCentury Letters ¥OHNSON LORD CHESTERFIELD fs C LA RACH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LETTERS 4 CBA WA OE ae EDITED BY R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON ¥OHNSON LORD CHESTERFIELD. With an Introduction by GEORGE BIRKBECK-HILL, D.C.L. > London A. D. Innes & Company Limited 1898 P or A.\A0\8S EDITOR'S PREFACE THE voluminous and interesting correspondence of the Eighteenth Century—when letter-writing was indeed an art—can only be read at present in more or less elaborate and expensive complete editions, or in small anthologies containing at most half-a-dozen letters by the same writer. The aim of the present series is to present a selec- tion of this inexhaustible material in groups, each sufficiently large to create an atmosphere. No attempt has been made to seek out one-letter men, or to unearth a neglected genius; but the leaders of thought and action—in so far as they wrote good letters—are represented by their most characteristic work, collected from all authentic sources. The choice of particular letters has been governed by literary rather than historical or even biographical considerations ; and each volume should be readable and complete in itself; illustrative at once of style and manners. To this end elaborate annotation seems tiresome and out of place, and incidental Vv EDITOR’S PREFACE references to trifling persons and events are deliberately neglected. The notes are designed to elucidate, not to interrupt, the narrative. Letters in foreign languages, almost all diplomatic correspondence, and philosophical or literary essays published as letters are omitted ; while on the other hand selections have been sometimes made from letters in journal form. It is hoped to cover the whole century ; and the volumes will be ultimately arranged, though not originally published, in chronological order; the rule of birth date being in some cases slightly modified for the union of friends or writers of one class. R. B. J. vi CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION ae a abt oe ils ix LETTERS FROM JOHNSON TO MRS, THRALE aoe wisi ies asi Si I TO BOSWELL ... oe ne a oa Bae 59 MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS TO MRS. BOSWELL ies aia vis sia 84 TO THE EARL OF CHESTERFIELD a nig 86 TO MR. JAMES MACPHERSON ... a ares 88 * TO SAMUEL RICHARDSON wi or site 88 TO MRS. MONTAGU sia ase sere aie 89 TO BENNET LANGTON ... a aia ss QI TO MR. JOSEPH BARETTI se sti aya 97 TO DR. TAYLOR ... sa nis are arsts 106 TO JOSEPH SIMPSON, ESQ. ial seu int 108 TO MR. PERKINS ens vag is +. ITO TO DAVID GARRICK sig oes ae stig IIo TO A LADY ie ips a i wa =| OEE TO MRS. JOHNSON (HIS ‘MOTHER aes «i $E3 TO MRS. JOHNSON (HIS WIFE) ... aa we «TTA Vil CONTENTS MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS (continued) TO MISS PORTER eg sein a TO MISS SOPHIA THRALE TO MISS SUSANNA THRALE TO MISS JANE LANGTON... nie i LETTERS FROM LORD CHESTERFIELD TO HIS SON TO HIS GODSON NOTES w+ TABLE OF DATES INDEX ... vili PAGE 116 117 119 120 121 195 238 239 241 INTRODUCTION “*WHAT a coalition!’ said Garrick, when he heard that the moral, pious Johnson and the gay, dissipated Beauclerk were companions.” “What a coalition!” the readers of this series will perhaps exclaim when they find Chesterfield and Johnson brought together in one volume. The great nobleman, statesman, courtier, and patron, “dignified but insolent,” whose “manner was exquisitely elegant,’ “who united wickedness and the Graces,” the companion of the “harmless drudge,” the lexicographer, the poor, un- couth author, who would have ridden rough-shod over the greatest peer in the land had he attempted “to unhinge and weaken good principles.” Great indeed was the gulf which parted the two men. Chesterfield urged his son, as the readiest means of giving his manners that polish which is the crown of the perfect man, to seduce a young married woman. Johnson, as he brought his Ramblers to a close, rejoiced in the know- ledge that he would be “numbered among the writers who have given ardour to virtue and confidence to truth.” It was on March 14, 1752, that Johnson thus nobly rejoiced. On the sixteenth of the same month Chesterfield wrote to his son—“ Have you found out that every woman is infallibly to be gained by every ix INTRODUCTION sort of flattery, and every man by one sort or other?” Chesterfield was the product of long years of that “studied behaviour” which Johnson ‘condemned. “I never considered,” the author said, “whether I should be a grave man or a merry man, but just let inclina- tion for the time have its course.” In the nobleman inclination had so long been governed by reflection that “studied behaviour” was not only his second, but his only nature. “Since I have had the full use of my reason,” he boasted, “nobody has ever seen me laugh.” “Johnson laughed like arhinoceros.” If Johnson was right in maintaining that “ Chesterfield was the proudest man that day existing,” then one quality they had in common, for few men were prouder than the poor scholar. How different how- ever was the pride of him whose worth had so long been depressed by poverty from the pride of the man who by his very birth was placed among the great ones of the land. “Johnson’s pride,” said Reynolds, “had no meanness in it.” Chesterfield’s was mean- ness itself. “I began the world,” he writes, “not with a bare desire, but with an insatiable thirst, a rage of popularity, applause, and admiration. If this made me do some silly things on the one hand, it made me on the other hand do almost all the right things I did ; it made me be attentive and civil to the women I disliked, and to the men I despised, in hopes of the applause of both.” With his own hands, to his own son of all men, he thus “bared the mean heart that lurked beneath a star.” One hundred and fifty years have gone by since the “retired and uncourtly scholar” was repulsed from the great nobleman’s door, and now Chesterfield is best known by the scornful letter Johnson wrote him. He is for all time x INTRODUCTION “the patron who looked with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he had reached ground, encumbered him with help.” With all these differences in character, differences scarcely less wide and fundamental than the states of life into which each had been called, the two men were like in the attentive eye with which they looked on the world around them. Their worlds indeed were as dissimilar as possible. Chesterfield’s was the court; Johnson’s the parlour, the tavern, and the street. Chesterfield’s was the more glittering ; Johnson’s the wider. Chesterfield knew one class; Johnson, with the exception of that one class, knew mankind. “Courts and camps,” said Chesterfield, “are the only places to learn the world in.” “The business of the attendant on a court,” wrote Johnson, “is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself.” A camp, however, he allowed to be “one of the great scenes of human life.” Chesterfield was ignorant of his ignorance of the world. “ Let me be your guide,” he wrote to his son, “who have gone all roads.” The roads along which he had gone were thronged with sedan-chairs, and with men and women in richly-laced clothes ; of the rough ways of life he knew nothing ; Johnson “had been running about the world more almost than anybody.” When Chesterfield keeps within his range he draws his characters with the greatest skill ; his world he knew as few have known it. As the men who belonged to it have so much that is common to all men, so in studying his descrip- tion of it we all can learn much about human nature in general. There is indeed no better book than his Letters to his Son for telling us our weaknesses and our follies, of which, to borrow Chesterfield’s words, x1 INTRODUCTION we are not likely to hear from any one among our friends. Johnson, “great moralist” though he was in his teaching, had none of a moralist’s narrowness in dealing with erring man. While he judged his own conduct sternly he showed no “surly virtue” in judg- ing the conduct of his neighbour. With a far more lenient eye would he have looked on a good man’s frailties than Chesterfield would have looked on a single offence against the Graces. He was as ready as the courtly nobleman to accept the judgment of the world in everything but the weightier matters of the law. “Of things that terminate in human life,” he wrote, “the world is the proper judge; to despise its sentence, if it were possible, is not just, and if it were just, is not possible.” For the mznores virtutes, the lesser morals, Chesterfield, when certain excep- tions are made, is no doubt the surer guide, for they had been the chief study of his life; they form, more- over, a very large part of the instruction he gave. Even here Johnson has much to say that is worth recording. “Theoretically,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “no man understood the rules of good breeding better than Dr. Johnson.” How admirably at times he acted upon them he showed when he refrained from “bandying civilities with his Sovereign.” While he could cross over the border into Chester- field’s domain, Chesterfield could never cross over into his, Johnson is great in all the great parts of life—its duties, its rights, its sorrows, and its hopes. He lived in a wholesome world. The “ familiar matters of the day” he knew equally well. His advice was sought by his friends in their troubles and perplexities, and was ever at their service. He is still an unerring guide as we beat “the common round.” xii INTRODUCTION How varied are the subjects with which he deals—the rights of parents; the separation of husbands and wives ; the productiveness of Polish oats and Siberian barley ; the duration of literary copyright; death and sorrow; the duty of gaiety ; diet and exercise; the proper treatment of old horses ; the management of the mind; heirs male; the translation of the Scriptures into Gaelic; the ambition of a brewer to out-brew a rival; debt, and the dangers of poverty ; the disappointment of preconcerted pleasure; the Clarendon Press and the book-trade; reading and preaching; valetudinarianism; the sufferings and fortitude of obscure life. Of his letters not far short of eleven hundred are already in print, and fresh ones come to light from time to time. In my recently-published /ohnsonian Miscellanies 1 included three-and-twenty which had escaped my search when I edited his Ledters, and now I have in my desk copies of a few more dis- covered in the last six months. Though his corre- spondents were numerous, it was to three persons that not far short of one-half of his letters were written. Mrs. Thrale received from him more than three hundred ; Dr. Taylor rather more than a hun- dred, and James Boswell rather less. Scattered letters soon after his death got into print; the first to pub- lish a collection was Mrs. Thale—Mrs, Piozzi, I should say, for by that time she was married to her second husband. In 1788 she gave them to the world in two handsome octavo volumes. Three years later Boswell followed, including in the Lzfe of Johnson, not only those which he had himself received, but all which he had been able to gather in his net. It is strange that, so far as appears, no payment was made in each xiii INTRODUCTION case for right of publication to the residuary legatee of Johnson’s estate, his black servant, Francis Barber. An injunction to restrain printing and publishing would have been at once granted to the executors, had they applied for it. Two of them were lawyers —Dr. Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell, the famous Admiralty Judge, and Sir John Hawkins, an attorney. The knight, however, was dead when the Lzfe ap- peared. Had they overlooked Barber’s rights, some lawyer, I should have thought, would have stirred him up to assert them. It is possible, of course, that some payment was made, but of this there is no record. On March 8, 1788, Mrs. Piozzi noted down in her Thraliana—* The Letters are out. They were pub- lished on Saturday, 8th of March. Cadell printed two thousand copies, and says eleven hundred are already sold. My letter to Jack Rice on his marriage seems the universal favourite. The book is well spoken of on the whole; yet Cadell murmurs ; I can- not make out why.” Boswell thus notices their publi- cation—“ As a proof of the high estimation set on anything which came from Johnson’s pen, this collec- tion of letters was sold by Mrs. Piozzi for five hundred pounds.” Against this entry she wrote on the margin of her copy of the Lz/e—“ How spiteful!” Boswell’s statement seems so innocent that the dis- covery of its spitefulness may easily baffle the saga- cious reader. He wounded the complacency with which she regarded her part of the correspondence. “Was nothing then paid for this ‘universal favourite,’ the letter to Jack Rice on his marriage?” she might indignantly have asked. “Why, of the two whole volumes it, and it alone, is quoted in the Annual Register.” She had little cause to be vain. The X1V AX siomsue AU UL passarjsip aq jou prnoo yey} pouoruow saiysed oy} spreMmoy ssouatjued yon OS YM Woy} spew ATUO Jo ‘sarmbur soy possosdd: uoos ays poyono, sys Sulsjs @ Jopua} Moy pot -iad ays uoym yah f Ajstyes prnod JT Mmauy oYys YoIe siejnoied jeioaes pue souleu [esJaAes JO paulo] aq 0} osore Aysomns yeinjeu e { Ayiplae jsow aU} YUM Woy} Suripeos uesoq oys ‘s319}J9] ay} aes josey j UoIseo90 sty} uodn Jjassay pojonpuos usen ay} sey Apjooms Moy pure A[JUSIOWIP MOF * °° Jaze ayy uodn asous Aue yeods 03 oinpua jou plnod | 3e SIIqQUITEMYIS ‘sI]{T 0} poumo ATYueI pure “ayer pesseq Ayuey J ysey ye yey} pofqns [sizzolg ‘s1] Joy uodn syoeye Auew os pey aaey J jyysis : ye payiejs J] Moy fsins00 9900 oUIeU INQ ‘sIDM poyexs sty Ayyiom Ajn3z ore uosuyof “Iq pasa -19A9 AU JO SJ9}J9] BY} JO INoj ynoqy * * * j pameu S}oISOI JLYM [| PeATADI YI sey sousos yeym [3 -peorl us0q J oAeY ssoupes yeyM YAAK ‘poystqndi IIS SE} ‘“SioquaTaMyos ‘siyy 0} uO passed os pl ‘uson() oY} 0} JUDO] UTese sem Jr WoYM WoL ‘(ora -IeyIny) ap sapeysy ‘Ady ey) JuoTNGINT, “AYE OF WU oy “(se[snogq 4q) essed jo doysig ay} 0} ssuoTi yooq esq4J,,,—gg4ri “6 Arenuef uo papsooo1 ‘ourny ys1y ay} Sulpess uo ‘Aouing sstj{ ‘Nod 94} poyoe UDA } JLY} SUOI}S OS JsoIOJUT UR PaSsNoOs ssoToy}AoA: ‘paysasay) prot fo ssayay oy, Sq apew useq pr Jaysea sreaA uaej}INoJ YOIYM 3s dy} 9yeU Jou Pp Aay} ysnoy} ‘sownyjoa om} Jay jo uoryeorqnd ayy ‘say SI Peq ST J9AazeU ‘sty SI} Ul poos stsaAajzeyA “WOpstm s,uosuyof p' ssulfes s.uosuyof jo ysey & nq Suryjou st, “u0N99T] Joy Ul poyasur ays yorym saystda porpnys asoy} ,, QUO SBM FI JOYJOYM JO Yuas JaAd SEM PI JOYJOYM ‘19}] INTRODUCTION The Queen a few days later told Miss Burney— “T said to Mr. Langton at the Drawing Room: ‘ Your friend, Dr. Johnson, sir, has had many friends busy to publish his books, and his memoirs, and his medi- tations, and his thoughts, but I think he wanted one friend more.” ‘What for, ma'am?’ cried he. ‘A friend to suppress them,’ I answered.” Hannah More wrote to her sister in 1788—“ There is little in Johnson's Letters to gratify curiosity or to justify impatience. They are such letters as ought to have been wyrtten, but ought never to have been printed. Still they are the true letters of friendship, which are meant to show kindness rather than wit. Every place to which he was invited, every dose of physic he took, everybody who sent to ask how he did, is recorded. Ican read them with a degree of interest because I knew and loved the man, and besides was often a party concerned in the dinners he mentions. A few of these letters are very good; sometimes he is moral, and sometimes he is kind—two points of view in which it is always agreeable to consider Johnson. J am often named, never with unkindness, sometimes with favour. The imprudence of editors and executors is an additional reason why men of parts should be afraid to die. Burke said to me the other day in allusion to the innumerable lives, anec- dotes, remains, etc. which have been published of Johnson— How many maggots have crawled out of that great body!’” Johnson’s letters to Mrs. Thrale exactly comply with a rule laid down by Chesterfield. “Letters,” wrote his Lordship to his son, “should be familiar conversations between absent friends. When you write to me, suppose yourself conversing freely with xvi INTRODUCTION me by the fireside. In that case you would naturally mention the incidents of the day ; as where you had been, who [szc] you had seen, what you thought of them, etc.” What it was that delighted Johnson in Mrs. Thrale’s side of the correspondence we learn from one of his replies, where he says—“ Such tattle as filled your last sweet letter prevents one great incon- venience of absence, that of returning home a stranger and an enquirer. The variations of life consist of little things. Important innovations are soon heard, and easily understood. Men that meet to talk of physics or metaphysics, or law or history, may be immediately acquainted. We look at each other in silence, only for want of petty talk upon slight occur- rences.” It was not “studied epistles’ that she sent to her old friend, or he would have speedily cried out, “ Fiddle-de-dee, my dear.” In his Life of Pope he writes—“ There is no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epis- tolary intercourse.” From these temptations, both in his letters to Mrs. Thrale, and to his correspondents in general, he was quite free. He did indeed say to Boswell—* It is now become so much the fashion to publish letters that, in order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can.” He was seventy-one years old when he said this. If this reticence was practised towards some of his correspondents, at no time does he show any trace of it when writing to his intimate friends. The man who “ talked without reserve in the public post-coach of the state of his affairs ;” whose “openness with people at a first interview was re- markable,” was little likely to put a restraint upon his pen. There was no need for secrecy in the subjects on which he wrote most willingly. To quote his own xvii b INTRODUCTION words, “he found the common course of life very fertile of observation and reflection,’ and from this common course he did not often depart. He was the great Cham of Literature, who ruled the world of letters as no man has ever ruled it since his time; nevertheless, in his correspondence it is very rarely of literature that he speaks. Chesterfield being a courtier, wrote of courts; Johnson, though an author, seldom mentioned books. How full his mind was of literary criticism and literary anecdotes he showed when in his old age he wrote the Lives of the Poets. In that work I do not know that there can be found a single repetition of what he had written in his letters. In the “levées ” which he held in his parlour, and in the meetings of his Club, where scholars and authors assembled, he found all the opportunity he needed to discuss questions such as these. Much as he delighted in the “affluence” of Burke’s talk, so far as is known he never wrote to him a single letter. His correspondence with Reynolds is always on some matter of the hour. “I love to see my friends,” he wrote to Boswell; “to hear from them, to talk to them, and to talk of them; but it is not without a considerable effort of resolution that I prevail upon myself to write.” The one exception to this, strange as at first sight it may appear, was when he wrote to the Southwark brewer’s wife. In writing to her he was, as he told her, writing to “that place which your kindness and Mr. Thrale’s allows me to call my home,” and he wrote not only without an effort, but even willingly and eagerly. Boswell, on the title-page of his Life of Johnson, describes the work—and describes it justly—as “ex- hibiting a view of literature and literary men in Great Xvili INTRODUCTION Britain for near half a century during which Johnson flourished.” To this view, as I have already implied, the letters contribute scarcely anything. They are not far short of three hundred and forty in number ; yet from them not even the barest outline of a literary history of the times could be sketched. Of Pope, Swift, Bolingbroke, Young, Berkeley, Butler, Thom- son, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Hume, Robertson, Churchill, Horace Walpole, Gray, Adam Smith and Gibbon, there would be little exaggeration in saying that there is no mention. Even Johnson’s friends in the world of literature and art very rarely find a place in these letters. Of Collins’s unhappy state he speaks once or twice. “Mr. Richardson,” he writes to Baretti, “is dead of an apoplexy, and his second daughter has married a merchant.” “Burke,” he tells a correspondent, “has made two speeches in the House, which were publicly commended by Mr. Pitt, and have filled the town with wonder.” Now and then we come across a little bit of news of Reynolds. Thus we read that “he has within these few days raised his price to twenty guineas a head.” Some years later on we are told that “he has taken too much to strong liquor, and seems to delight in his new character.” Of Goldsmith indeed we learn per- haps more than of any other man of the set. Thus when She Stoops to Conquer was on the eve of appear- ing, Johnson wrote—‘ Dr. Goldsmith has a new comedy in rehearsal at Covent-Garden, to which the manager predicts ill success. I hope he will be mis- taken. I think it deserves a very kind reception.” The next mention of his friend, which comes sixteen months later, is of a very different nature. “Of poor dear Dr. Goldsmith” (he wrote to Boswell) “there is xix INTRODUCTION little to be told, more than the papers have made publick. He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness of mind. His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources were exhausted. Sir Joshua is of opinion that he owed not less than two thousand pounds. Was ever poet so trusted before ?” Once we get a description scarcely surpassed by anything in Horace Walpole. Johnson is telling Bennet Langton of the production of Dodsley’s tragedy of Cleone at Covent-Garden, after it had been rejected by Garrick, at Drury Lane. “The two Wartons,” he wrote, “just looked into the town, and were taken to see Cleone, where, David says, they were starved for want of company to keep them warm. David and Doddy have had a new quarrel, and, I think, cannot conveniently quarrel any more. Cleone was well acted by all the characters, but Bellamy left nothing to be desired. I went the first night, and supported it, as well as I might; for Doddy, you know, is my patron, and I would not desert him. The play was very well received. Doddy, after the danger was over, went every night to the stage-side, and cried at the distress of poor Cleone.” If in these letters there is little mention of literary matters, there is still less of matters which concern the State. The conquests of England, the battles by sea and land, are passed over in silence. The empire which Clive and Warren Hastings were building up in India never troubles Johnson’s pen. On the loss of another empire in America he is equally silent. “I cannot help smiling,” wrote Horace Walpole in 1759, to his correspondent in Florence, “at the great objects of our letters. We never converse on a less topic than a kingdom. We are a kind of citizens of the XX INTRODUCTION world, and battles and revolutions are the common incidents of our neighbourhood.” In this same year Johnson wrote eighteen letters. The death of his aged mother was his chief topic, and the desolation which had fallen on him thereby. Of “the captured standards which were borne in triumph from Ken- sington Palace to the city, and were suspended in St. Paul’s church, amidst the roar of guns and kettle- drums, and the shouts of an immense multitude” we hear not a word. The procession swept past Inner Temple Lane where he was living, and down his beloved Fleet Street, but he never mentions it. Per- haps, however, if his mother had been living he would have described it all to her. The correspondence which passed between them he unfortunately burnt just before his death. In his correspondence with Dr. Taylor, however, which Boswell never saw, he is more outspoken. The gloom that settled over the country when with our revolted colonies were leagued France, Spain and Holland moved him at times to speak. To Mrs. Thrale too he now and then opened his mouth on public matters; but he soon turned away from such painful thoughts. “Corruption and oppression in India are, I believe, at an enormous height,” he wrote to Taylor. “You and I, however,” he continues, “have more urgent cares than for the East Indian Company. We are old and unhealthy. Let us do what we can to comfort one another.” To Mrs. Thrale he wrote—‘To any man who extends his thoughts to national considerations the times are dismal and gloomy. But to a sick man what is the public?” Domestic politics trouble his pen as little as foreign affairs. Parliament might never have sat xxi INTRODUCTION for all that can be learnt by the letters published by Boswell. There is indeed a brief mention of the younger Pitt’s coming into power, and of Fox’s “resolutely standing for Westminster. Mr. Hoole,” he adds, “has just told me that the city leans towards the King.” To this general reticence there is one exception. The Gordon Riots are described at some length. With “the fire yet glowing in the ruins of Newgate, while the Protestants were plundering the Sessions-house at the Old Bailey,” at only a few minutes’ walk from his house in Bolt Court, “the public” became almost everything even “to a sick man.” To sum up the judgment I have formed of Johnson as a letter-writer, I shall venture to quote the following passage from my preface to the two volumes of his collected letters published for me by the Clarendon Press. “T cannot but think that now that Johnson’s letters are collected, he will take a far higher rank among letter-writers than he has as yet filled. Admirable as many of those are which are published by Boswell, nevertheless in the Lzfe they are overshadowed, as it were, by his superlative merit as a talker. We hurry through them, or even skip over them, to arrive at the passages where the larger type and the inverted commas give signs that there we shall have good talk. His letters may be good, but his talk has no rival. But when we no longer have it to tempt us, we shall not fail to recognize how admirable he was in his correspondence. What a variety, moreover, does it exhibit! We have those fine and weighty passages in which he treated of the greatest of all arts—the art of living, and taught, as few philosophers have xxii INTRODUCTION better taught, the management of the mind, whether it is troubled by cares or well-nigh broken by grief. We have that strong common sense set forth in vigorous English, on which his friends could always draw in their perplexities. We have, moreover, above all in his letters to Mrs, Thrale, a playfulness and lightness of touch which will surprise those who know him only by his formal writings. How pleasantly, for instance, does he laugh at his friend Taylor whose ‘talk was of bullocks,’ who bred cattle almost as eagerly as he hunted after preferments, and who was famous, it was said, for having the largest bull in England and some of the best sermons. The sermons were Johnson’s, and the bull Johnson has almost made his own by the humorous way in which from time to time he introduces him in his letters. ‘I have seen the great bull,’ he writes, ‘and very great he is. I have seen likewise his heir-apparent, who promises to inherit all the bulk and all the virtues of his sire. I have seen the man who offered an hundred guineas for the young bull, while he was yet little better than a calf’?