Though I very well know the bland emollient saponaceous qualities both of sack and silver, yet if any great man would say to me, ’I make you Rat-catcher to his Majesty, with a salary of L300 a-year and two butts of the best Malaga; and though it has been usual to catch a mouse or two, for form’s sake, in public once a year, yet to you, sir, we shall not stand on these things,’ I cannot say I should jump at it; nay, if they would drop the very name of the office, and call me Sinecure to the King’s Majesty, I should feel a little awkward, and think everybody I saw smelt a rat about me; but I do not pretend to blame any one else that has not the same sensations; for my part, I would rather be serjeant trumpeter or pinmaker to the palace.  Nevertheless I interest myself a little in the history of it, and rather wish somebody may accept it who will retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be retrieveable, or ever had any credit.  Rowe was, I think, the last man of character that had it.  As to Settle, whom you mention, he belonged to my lord mayor, not to the King.  Eusden was a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turned out a drunken person.  Dryden was as disgraceful to the office from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses.  The office itself has always humbled the professor hitherto (even in an age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor writer by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there are poets little enough to envy even a poet laureate.

To DR. WHARTON

A holiday in Kent

Pembroke College, 26 Aug. 1766.

DEAR DOCTOR,

Whatever my pen may do, I am sure my thoughts expatiate nowhere oftener, or with more pleasure, than to Old Park.  I hope you have made my peace with Miss Deborah.  It is certain, whether her name were in my letter or not, she was as present to my memory as the rest of the little family; and I desire you would present her with two kisses in my name, and one a piece to all the others; for I shall take the liberty to kiss them all (great and small) as you are to be my proxy.

In spite of the rain, which I think continued with very short intervals till the beginning of this month, and quite effaced the summer from the year, I made a shift to pass May and June, not disagreeably, in Kent.  I was surprised at the beauty of the road to Canterbury, which (I know not why) had not struck me in the same manner before.  The whole country is a rich and well cultivated garden; orchards, cherry grounds, hop grounds, intermixed with corn and frequent villages, gentle risings covered with wood, and everywhere the Thames and Medway breaking in upon the landscape, with all their navigation.  It was indeed owing to the bad weather that the whole scene was dressed in that tender emerald green, which one usually sees