I am much more impatient to see Mr. Gray’s print, than Mr. What-d’ye-call-him’s [Masters’s] answer to my “Historic Doubts."[1] He may have made himself very angry; but I doubt whether he will make me at all so.  I love antiquities; but I scarce ever knew an antiquary who knew how to write upon them.  Their understandings seem as much in ruins as the things they describe.  For the Antiquarian Society, I shall leave them in peace with Whittington and his Cat.  As my contempt for them has not, however, made me disgusted with what they do not understand, antiquities, I have published two numbers of “Miscellanies,” and they are very welcome to mumble them with their toothless gums.  I want to send you these—­not their gums, but my pieces, and a “Grammont,"[2] of which I have printed only a hundred copies, and which will be extremely scarce, as twenty-five copies are gone to France.  Tell me how I shall convey them safely.

[Footnote 1:  Mr. Masters’s pamphlet, printed at the expense of the Antiquarian Society in the second volume of the “Archaeologia.”—­WALPOLE.]

[Footnote 2:  He had just published a small edition of Grammont’s Memoirs, “Augmentee de Notes et eclaircissemens necessaires, par M. Horace Walpole,” and had dedicated it to Mme. du Deffand.]

Another thing you must tell me, if you can, is, if you know anything ancient of the Freemasons.  Governor Pownall,[1] a Whittingtonian, has a mind they should have been a corporation erected by the popes.  As you see what a good creature I am, and return good for evil, I am engaged to pick up what I can for him, to support this system, in which I believe no more than in the pope:  and the work is to appear in a volume of the Society’s pieces.  I am very willing to oblige him, and turn my cheek, that they may smite that, also.  Lord help them!  I am sorry they are such numskulls, that they almost make me think myself something; but there are great authors enough to bring me to my senses again.  Posterity, I fear, will class me with the writers of this age, or forget me with them, not rank me with any names that deserve remembrance.  If I cannot survive the Milles’s, the What-d’ye-call-him’s [Masters’s], and the compilers of catalogues of Topography, it would comfort me very little to confute them.  I should be as little proud of success as if I had carried a contest for churchwarden.

[Footnote 1:  Thomas Pownall, Esq., the antiquary, and a constant contributor to the “Archaeologia.”  Having been governor of South Carolina and other American colonies, he was always distinguished from his brother John, who was likewise an antiquary, by the title of Governor.]

Not being able to return to Strawberry Hill, where all my books and papers are, and my printer lying fallow, I want some short bills to print.  Have you anything you wish printed?  I can either print a few to amuse ourselves, or, if very curious, and not too dry, could make a third number of “Miscellaneous Antiquities.”