Though I am glad of the late revolution,[1] a word for which I have great reverence, I shall certainly not dispute with you thereon.  I abhor exultation.  If the change produces peace, I shall make a bonfire in my heart.  Personal interest I have none; you and I shall certainly never profit by the politics to which we are attached.  The “Archaeologic Epistle” I admire exceedingly, though I am sorry it attacks Mr. Bryant,[2] whom I love and respect.  The Dean is so absurd an oaf, that he deserves to be ridiculed.  Is anything more hyperbolic than his preferences of Rowley to Homer, Shakspeare, and Milton?  Whether Rowley or Chatterton was the author, are the poems in any degree comparable to those authors? is not a ridiculous author an object of ridicule?  I do not even guess at your meaning in your conclusive paragraph on that subject:  Dictionary-writer I suppose alludes to Johnson; but surely you do not equal the compiler of a dictionary to a genuine poet?  Is a brickmaker on a level with Mr. Essex?  Nor can I hold that exquisite wit and satire are Billingsgate; if they were, Milles and Johnson would be able to write an answer to the “Epistle.”  I do as little guess whom you mean that got a pension by Toryism:  if Johnson too, he got a pension for having abused pensioners, and yet took one himself, which was contemptible enough.  Still less know I who preferred opposition to principles, which is not a very common case; whoever it was, as Pope says,

    The way he took was strangely round about.

[Footnote 1:  In March Lord North resigned, and been replaced by Lord Rockingham, who had been Prime Minister before in 1765.]

[Footnote 2:  Bryant, the celebrated or notorious critic, who published a treatise in which he denied the existence of Troy, and even called in question that of Homer—­a work which, whether Walpole agreed with him on this point or not, afterwards drew down on him the indignant denunciations of Byron.  It was well for him that he wrote before the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann.]

HIGHWAYMEN AND FOOTPADS.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

STRAWBERRY HILL, Sept. 8, 1782.

...  I am perfectly ignorant of the state of the war abroad; they say we are in no pain for Gibraltar:  but I know that we are in a state of war at home that is shocking.  I mean, from the enormous profusion of housebreakers, highwaymen, and footpads; and, what is worse, from the savage barbarities of the two latter, who commit the most wanton cruelties.  This evil is another fruit of the American war.  Having no vent for the convicts that used to be transported to our late colonies, a plan was adopted for confining them on board of lighters for the term of their sentences.  In those colleges, undergraduates in villainy commence Masters of Arts, and at the expiration of their studies issue as mischievous as if they had taken their degrees in law, physic, or divinity, at one of our regular