Well! at last Sisson’s machine sets out-but, my dear Sir, how you still talk of him!  You seem to think him as grave and learned as a professor of Bologna—­why, he is an errant, low, indigent mechanic, and however Dr. Perelli found him out, is a shuffling knave, and I fear, no fitter to execute his orders than to write the letter you expect.  Then there was my ignorance and your brother James’s ignorance to be thrown into the account.  For the drawing, Sisson says Dr. Perelli has the description of it already; however, I have insisted on his making a reference to that description in a scrawl we have with much ado extorted from him.  I pray to Sir Isaac Newton that the machine may answer:  It costs, the stars know what!  The whole charge comes to upwards of threescore pounds!  He had received twenty pounds, and yet was so necessitous, that on our hesitating, he wrote me a most impertinent letter for his money.  I dreaded at first undertaking a commission for which I was so unqualified, and though I have done all I could, I fear you and your friend will be but ill satisfied.

Along with the machine I have sent you some new books; Lord George’s trial, Lord Ferrers’s, and the account of him; a fashionable thing called Tristram Shandy, and my Lord Lyttelton’s new Dialogues of the Dead, or rather Dead Dialogues; and something less valuable still than any of these, but which I flatter myself you will not despise; it is my own print, done from a picture that is reckoned very like—­you must allow for the difference that twenty years since you saw me have made.  That wonderful creature Lord Ferrers, of whom I told you so much in my last, and with whom I am not going to plague you much more, made one of his keepers read Hamlet to him the night before his death after he was in bed-paid all his bills in the morning, as if leaving an inn, and half an hour before the sheriffs fetched him, corrected some verses he had written in the Tower in imitation of the Duke of Buckingham’s epitaph, dublus sed ron improbus vin.(65) What a noble author have I here to add to my Catalogue!  For the other noble author, Lord Lyttelton, you will find his work paltry enough; the style, a mixture of bombast, poetry, and vulcarisms.  Nothing new in the composition, except making people talk out of character is so.  Then he loves changing sides so much, that he makes Lord Falkland and Hampden cross over and figure in like people in a country dance; not to mention their guardian angels, who deserve to be hanged for murder.  He is angry too at Swift, Lucian, and Rabelais, as if they had laughed at him of all men living, and he seems to wish that one would read the last’s Dissertation 1 on Hippocrates instead of his History of Pantagruel.  But I blame him most, when he was satirizing too free writers, for praising the King of Prussia’s poetry, to which any thing of Bayle is harmless.  I like best the Dialogue between the Duke of argyll and the Earl of Angus, and the character of his own first wife under that of Penelope.  I need not tell you that Pericles is Mr. Pitt.