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VIII. MR. GRAY TO MR. WEST.

AFTER a month's expectation of you, and a fortnight's despair, at Cambridge, I am come to town, and to better hopes of seeing you. If what you sent me last be the product of your melancholy, what may I not expect from your more cheerful hours? For by this time the ill health that you complain of is (I hope) quite departed; though, if I were self-interested, I ought to wish for the continuance of any thing that could be the occasion of so much pleasure to me.* Low spirits are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me; but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid company in the world. However, when you come, I believe they must undergo the fate of all humble companions, and be discarded. Would I could turn them to the same use that you have done, and make an

Apollo of them. If they could write such verses

with me, not hartshorn, nor spirit of amber, nor all that furnishes the closet of an apothecary's

* Grief fills the room up of my absent child;

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, &c.-Rogers.

widow, should persuade me to part with them : But, while I write to you, I hear the bad news of Lady Walpole's death on Saturday night last. Forgive me if the thought of what my poor Horace must feel on that account, obliges me to have done in reminding you that I am yours, &c. London, Aug. 22, 1737.

IX. MR. GRAY TO MR. WALPOLE.

I WAS hindered in my last, and so could not give you all the trouble I would have done. The description of a road, which your coach wheels have so often honoured, it would be needless to give you; suffice it that I arrived safe* at my Uncle's, who is a great hunter in imagination; his dogs take up every chair in the house, so I am forced to stand at this present writing; and though the gout forbids him galloping after them in the field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and nose with their comfortable noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for walking when I should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My comfort amidst all this is, that I have at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing

* At Burnham, in Buckinghamshire.

in it but myself. tains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover cliff; but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and craggs that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dangerous: Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds,

It is a little chaos of moun

And as they bow their hoary tops relate,

In murm'ring sounds, the dark decrees of fate;
While visions, as poetic eyes avow,

Cling to each leaf, and swarm on every bough.

At the foot of one of these squats ME I,* (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise, before he had an Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do there. In this situation I often converse with my Horace, aloud too, that is talk to you, but I do not remember that I

* The same ludicrous expression is met with in Foote's Play of the Knights, p. 27, from the mouth of Sir Penurious Trifle," And what does me I, but take a trip to a coffee-house in St. Martin's-lane," &c.-See also Don Quixote by Smollett, vol. iv. p. 30, and Cibber's Lady's Stake, vol. ii. act 1, p. 209.-Ed.

ever heard you answer me. I beg pardon for taking all the conversation to myself, but it is entirely your own fault. We have old Mr. Southern at a Gentleman's house a little way off, who often comes to see us; he is now seventy-seven years old,* and has almost wholly lost his memory; but is as agreeable as an old man can be, at least I persuade myself so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko. I shall be in Town in

about three weeks. Adieu.

September, 1737.

X. MR. GRAY TO MR. WALPOLE. †

I SYMPATHIZE with you in the sufferings which you foresee are coming upon you. We are both at present, I imagine, in no very agreeable situation; for my part I am under the misfortune of having nothing to do, but it is a misfortune which, thank my stars, I can pretty well bear. You are

* He lived nine years longer, and died at the great age of eighty-six. Mr. Gray always thought highly of his pathetic powers, at the same time that he blamed his ill taste for mixing them so injudiciously with farce, in order to produce that monstrous species of composition called Tragi-comedy.-Mason.

At this time with his father at Houghton. Mr. Gray writes from the same place he did before, from his Uncle's house in Buckinghamshire.-Mason.

in a confusion of wine, and roaring, and hunting, and tobacco, and, heaven be praised, you too can pretty well bear it; while our evils are no more I believe we shall not much repine. I imagine, however, you will rather choose to converse with the living dead, that adorn the walls of your apartments, than with the dead living that deck the middles of them; and prefer a picture of still life to the realities of a noisy one, and as I guess, will imitate what you prefer, and for an hour or two at noon will stick yourself up as formal as if you had been fixed in your frame for these hundred years, with a pink or rose in one hand, and a great seal ring on the other. Your name, I assure you, has been propagated in these countries by a convert of yours, one he has brought over his whole family to you; they were before pretty good Whigs, but now they are absolute Walpolians. We have hardly any body in the parish but knows exactly the dimensions of the hall and saloon at Houghton, and begin to believe that the + lanthorn is not so great a consumer of the fat of the land as disaffected persons have said: For your reputation, we keep to ourselves your not hunting nor

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+ A lanthorn for eighteen candles, of copper-gilt, hung in the hall at Houghton. It became a favourite object of Tory satire at the time; see the Craftsman. This lanthorn was afterwards sold to the Earl of Chesterfield. See Walpole's Works, vol. ii. p. 263; and Letters to H. Maun, vol. ii. p. 368.-Ed.

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