In answer to you, yourself, my good Sir, I shall not subscribe to your censure of Mr. Mason, whom I love and admire, and who has shown the greatest taste possible in the execution of this work.  Surely he has said enough in gratitude, and done far beyond what gratitude could demand., It seems delicacy in expatiating on the legacy; particularizing more gratitude would have lessened the evidence of friendship, and made the ’justice done to Gray’s character look more like a debt.,_ He speaks of him in slender circumstances, not as distressed:  and so he was till after the deaths of his parents and aunts; and even then surely not rich.  I think he does somewhere say that he meant to be buried with his mother, and not specifying any other place confirms it.  In short, Mr. Mason shall never know your criticisms; he has a good heart, and would feel them, though certainly not apprised that he would merit them.  A man who has so called out all his -friend’s virtues, could not want them himself.

I shall be much obliged to you for the prints you destine for me.  The Earl of Cumberland I have, and will not rob you of.  I wish you had been as successful with Mr. G. as with Mr. T. I mean, if you are not yet paid-now is the time, for he has sold his house to the Duke of Marlborough-I suppose he will not keep his prints long:  he changes his pursuits Continually and extravagantly-and then sells to indulge new fancies.

I have had a piece of luck within these two days.  I have long lamented our having no certain piece written by Anne Boleyn’s brother, Lord Rochford.  I have found a very pretty copy of verses by him in the new published volume of the Nuge Antiquae, though by mistake he is called, Earl of, instead Of Viscount, Rochford.  They are taken from a Ms-dated twenty-eight years after the author’s death, and are much in the manner of Lord Surrey’s and Sir T. Wyat’s poems.  I should at first have doubted if they were not counterfeited, on reading my Noble Authors; but then the blunder of earl for viscount would hardly have been committed.  A little modernized and softened in the cadence, they would be very pretty.

I have got the rest of the Digby pictures, but at a very high rate.  There is one very large of Sir Kenelm, his wife, and two sons, in exquisite preservation, though the heads of him and his wife are not so highly finished as those I have—­yet the boys and draperies are so that, together with the size, it is certainly the most capital miniature in the world:  there are a few more, very fine too.  I shall be happy to show them to you, whenever You Burnhamize—­I mean before August, when I propose making my dear old blind friend a visit at Paris—­nothing else would carry me thither.  I am too old to seek diversions, and too indolent to remove to a distance by choice, though not so immovable as you to much less distance.  Adieu!  Pray tell me what you hear is said of Gray’s Life at Cambridge.