lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him.  The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it.  You say you made the alteration for the “friendly reader;” but the “malicious” will take it to himself.  Damn ’em! if you give ’em an inch, etc.  The Preface is noble, and such as you should write.  I wish I could set my name to it, Imprimatur; but you have set it there yourself, and I thank you.  I had rather be a doorkeeper in your margin than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies.  The poems in the volumes which are new to me are so much in the old tone that I hardly received them as novelties.  Of those of which I had no previous knowledge, the “Four Yew-Trees” and the mysterious company which you have assembled there most struck me,—­“Death the Skeleton, and Time the Shadow.”  It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is one of the last results he must have gone thinking on for years for, “Laodamia” is a very original poem,—­I mean original with reference to your own manner.  You have nothing like it, I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation.

Let me in this place, for I have writ you several letters naming it, mention that my brother, who is a picture-collector, has picked up an undoubtable picture of Milton. [2] He gave a few shillings for it, and could get no history with it, but that some old lady had had it for a great many years.  Its age is ascertainable from the state of the canvas, and you need only see it to be sure that it is the original of the heads in the Tonson editions, with which we are all so well familiar.  Since I saw you, I have had a treat in the reading way which conies not every day,—­the Latin poems of V. Bourne, which were quite new to me.  What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes!—­a proper counterpoise to some people’s rural extravaganzas.  Why I mention him is, that your “Power of Music” reminded me of his poem of “The Ballad-singer in the Seven Dials,” Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the A B C, which, after all, he says, he hesitates not to call Newton’s “Principia”?  I was lately fatiguing myself with going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow,—­excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales.  But what an aching vacuum of matter!  I don’t stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets.  From thence I turned to Bourne.  What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matter-ful creature, sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English!  Bless him!  Latin wasn’t good enough for him.  Why wasn’t he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?