Your Lordship sees that I am no enthusiast to Mr. Gray:  his great lustre has not dazzled me, as his obscurity seems to have blinded his contemporaries.  Indeed, I do not think that they ever admired him, except in his Churchyard, though the Eton Ode was far its superior, and is certainly not obscure.  The Eton Ode is perfect:  those of more masterly execution have defects, yet not to admire them is total want of taste.  I have an aversion to tame poetry; at best, perhaps the art is the sublimest of the difficiles nugae; to measure or rhyme prose is trifling without being difficult.

To GEORGE MONTAGU

At Lady Suffolk’s

Arlington Street, 11 Jan. 1764.

It is an age, I own, since I wrote to you; but except politics, what was there to send you? and for politics, the present are too contemptible to be recorded by anybody but journalists, gazetteers, and such historians!  The ordinary of Newgate, or Mr.——­, who write for their monthly half-crown, and who are indifferent whether Lord Bute, Lord Melcombe, or Maclean is their hero, may swear they find diamonds on dunghills; but you will excuse me, if I let our correspondence lie dormant rather than deal in such trash.  I am forced to send Lord Hertford and Sir Horace Mann such garbage, because they are out of England, and the sea softens and makes palatable any potion, as it does claret; but unless I can divert you, I had rather wait till we can laugh together; the best employment for friends, who do not mean to pick one another’s pockets, nor make a property of either’s frankness.  Instead of politics, therefore, I shall amuse you to-day with a fairy tale.

I was desired to be at my Lady Suffolk’s on New Year’s morn, where I found Lady Temple and others.  On the toilet Miss Hotham spied a small round box.  She seized it with all the eagerness and curiosity of eleven years.  In it was wrapped up a heart-diamond ring, and a paper in which, in a hand as small as Buckinger’s, who used to write the Lord’s Prayer in the compass of a silver penny, were the following lines: 

  Sent by a sylph, unheard, unseen,
  A new-year’s gift from Mab our queen: 
  But tell it not, for if you do,
  You will be pinch’d all black and blue. 
  Consider well, what a disgrace,
  To show abroad your mottled face: 
  Then seal your lips, put on the ring,
  And sometimes think of Ob. the King.

You will easily guess that Lady Temple was the poetess, and that we were delighted with the genteelness of the thought and execution.  The child, you may imagine, was less transported with the poetry than the present.  Her attention, however, was hurried backwards and forwards from the ring to a new coat, that she had been trying on when sent for down; impatient to revisit her coat, and to show the ring to her maid, she whisked upstairs; when she came down again, she found a letter sealed, and lying on the floor—­new exclamations!  Lady Suffolk bade her open it:  here it is: