of time, a single line, a half-worn-out inscription, remain faithful to their trust.  Blest be the man that first introduced these strangers into our islands, and may they never want protection or merit!  I have not the least doubt that the finest poem in the English language, I mean Milton’s Il Penseroso, was composed in the long-resounding aisle of a mouldering cloister or ivy’d abbey.  Yet after all do you know that I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tomb of the Capulets.  I should like, however, that my dust should mingle with kindred dust.  The good old expression ‘family burying-ground’ has something pleasing in it, at least to me.

To JAMES BARRY

A friend’s infirmities

Gregories, 16 Sept. 1769.

MY DEAR BARRY,

I am most exceedingly obliged to your friendship and partiality, which attributed a silence very blameable on our parts to a favourable cause:  let me add in some measure to its true cause, a great deal of occupation of various sorts, and some of them disagreeable enough.

As to any reports concerning your conduct and behaviour, you may be very sure they could have no kind of influence here; for none of us are of such a make as to trust to any one’s report for the character of a person whom we ourselves know.  Until very lately, I had never heard anything of your proceedings from others; and when I did, it was much less than I had known from yourself, that you had been upon ill terms with the artists and virtuosi in Rome, without much mention of cause or consequence.  If you have improved these unfortunate quarrels to your advancement in your art, you have turned a very disagreeable circumstance to a very capital advantage.  However you may have succeeded in this uncommon attempt, permit me to suggest to you, with that friendly liberty which you have always had the goodness to bear from me, that you cannot possibly have always the same success, either with regard to your fortune or your reputation.  Depend upon it, that you will find the same competitions, the same jealousies, the same arts and cabals, the emulations of interest and of fame, and the same agitations and passions here that you have experienced in Italy; and if they have the same effect on your temper, they will have just the same effects upon your interest; and be your merit what it will, you will never be employed to paint a picture.  It will be the same at London as at Rome, and the same in Paris as in London, for the world is pretty nearly alike in all its parts; nay, though it would perhaps be a little inconvenient to me, I had a thousand times rather you should fix your residence in Rome than here, as I should not then have the mortification of seeing with my own eyes a genius of the first rank lost to the world, himself, and his friends; as I certainly must, if you do not assume a manner of acting and thinking here, totally different from what your letters from Rome have described to me.