To your book, Sir, I am much obliged on many accounts; particularly for having recalled my mind to subjects of delight, to which it was grown dulled by age and indolence.  In consequence of your reclaiming it, I asked myself whence you feel so much disregard for certain authors whose fame is established:  you have assigned good reasons for withholding your approbation from some, on the plea of their being imitators:  it was natural, then, to ask myself again, whence they had obtained so much celebrity.  I think I have discovered a cause, which I do not remember to have seen noted; and that cause I suspect to have been, that certain of those authors possessed grace:—­do not take me for a disciple of Lord Chesterfield, nor imagine that I mean to erect grace into a capital ingredient of writing, but I do believe that it is a perfume that will serve from putrefaction, and is distinct even from style, which regards expression. Grace, I think, belongs to manner.  It is from the charm of grace that I believe some authors, not in your favour, obtained part of their renown; Virgil, in particular:  and yet I am far from disagreeing with you on his subject in general.  There is such a dearth of invention in the Aeneid (and when he did invent, it was often so foolishly), so little good sense, so little variety, and so little power over the passions, that I have frequently said, from contempt for his matter, and from the charm of his harmony, that I believe I should like his poem better, if I was to hear it repeated, and did not understand Latin.  On the other hand, he has more than harmony:  whatever he utters is said gracefully, and he ennobles his images, especially in the Georgics; or, at least, it is more sensible there, from the humility of the subject.  A Roman farmer might not understand his diction in agriculture; but he made a Roman courtier understand farming, the farming of that age, and could captivate a lord of Augustus’s bedchamber, and tempt him to listen to themes of rusticity.  On the contrary, Statius and Claudian, though talking of war, would make a soldier despise them as bullies.  That graceful manner of thinking in Virgil seems to me to be more than style, if I do not refine too much:  and I admire, I confess, Mr. Addison’s phrase, that Virgil “tossed about his dung with an air of majesty.”  A style may be excellent without grace:  for instance, Dr. Swift’s.  Eloquence may bestow an immortal style, and one of more dignity; yet eloquence may want that ease, that genteel air that flows from or constitutes grace.  Addison himself was master of that grace, even in his pieces of humour, and which do not owe their merit to style; and from that combined secret he excels all men that ever lived; but Shakspeare, in humour,[1] by never dropping into an approach towards burlesque and buffoonery, when even his humour descended to characters that in other hands would have been vulgarly low.  Is not it clear that Will Wimble was a gentleman, though he always lived at a distance from good company?  Fielding had as much humour, perhaps, as Addison; but, having no idea of grace, is perpetually disgusting.  His innkeepers and parsons are the grossest of their profession; and his gentlemen are awkward when they should be at their ease.