is a wildness in them that captivates.  However, if you could wade through two octavos of Dame Piozzi’s though’s and so’s and I trow’s, and cannot listen to seven volumes of Scheherezade’s narrations, I will sue for a divorce in foro Parnassi, and Boccalini shall be my proctor.  The cause will be a counterpart to the sentence of the Lacedaemonian, who was condemned for breach of the peace, by saying in three words what he might have said in two.

[Footnote 1:  Atterbury (Pope’s “mitred Rochester”) was Bishop of Rochester in the reigns of Anne and George I. He was so violent in his Jacobitism, that on the death of Queen Anne he offered to head a procession to proclaim James III. as king at Charing Cross.  Afterwards Sir R. Walpole had evidence of his maintaining a treasonable correspondence with the Court of St. Germains, sufficient to have ensured his conviction, but, being always of a merciful disposition, and naturally unwilling to bring a Bishop to the block, he contented himself with passing a Bill of Pains and Penalties to deprive him of his bishopric and banish him for life.]

You are not the first Eurydice[1] that has sent her husband to the devil, as you have kindly proposed to me; but I will not undertake the jaunt, for if old Nicholas Pluto should enjoin me not to look back to you, I should certainly forget the prohibition like my predecessor.  Besides, I am a little too close to take a voyage twice which I am so soon to repeat; and should be laughed at by the good folks on the other side of the water, if I proposed coming back for a twinkling only.  No; I choose as long as I can

    Still with my fav’rite Berrys to remain.

So, you was not quite satisfied, though you ought to have been transported, with King’s College Chapel, because it has no aisles, like every common cathedral.  I suppose you would object to a bird of paradise, because it has no legs, but shoots to heaven in a trail, and does not rest on earth.  Criticism and comparison spoil many tastes.  You should admire all bold and unique essays that resemble nothing else; the “Botanic Garden,"[2] the “Arabian Nights,” and King’s Chapel are above all rules:  and how preferable is what no one can imitate, to all that is imitated even from the best models!  Your partiality to the pageantry of popery I do approve, and I doubt whether the world would not be a loser (in its visionary enjoyments) by the extinction of that religion, as it was by the decay of chivalry and the proscription of the heathen deities.  Reason has no invention; and as plain sense will never be the legislator of human affairs, it is fortunate when taste happens to be regent.