You are too candid in submitting at once to my defence of Mr. Mason.  It is true I am more charmed with his book than I almost ever was with one.  I find more people like the grave letters than those of humour, and some think the latter a little affected, which is as wrong a judgment as they could make; for Gray never wrote any thing easily but things of humour.  Humour was his natural and original turn—­and though from his childhood he was grave and reserved, his genius led him to see things ludicrously and satirically; and though his health and dissatisfaction gave him low spirits, his melancholy turn was much more affected than his pleasantry in writing.  You knew him enough to know I am in the right-but the world in general always wants to be told how to think, as well as what to think.  The print, I agree with you, though like, is a very disagreeable likeness, and the worst likeness of him.  It gives the primness he had under constraint; and there is a blackness in the countenance which was like him only the last time I ever saw him, when I was much struck with it:  and, though I did not apprehend him in danger, it left an impression on me that was uneasy, and almost prophetic of what I heard but too soon after leaving him.  Wilson drew the picture under such impression, and I could not bear it in my room; Mr. Mason altered it a little, but Still it is not well, nor gives any idea of the determined virtues of his heart.  It just serves to help the reader to an image of the person whose genius and integrity they must admire, if they are so happy as to have a taste for either.

The Peep into the Gardens at Twickenham is a silly little book, of which a few little copies were printed some years ago for presents, and which now sets up for itself as a vendible book.  It is a most inaccurate, superficial, blundering account of Twickenham and other places, drawn up by a Jewess, who has married twice, and turned Christian, poetess, and authoress.  She has printed her poems, too, and one complimentary copy of mine, which, in good breeding, I could not help Sending her in return for violent compliments in verse to me.  I do not remember that hers were good; mine I know were very bad, and certainly never intended for the press.

I bought the first volume of Manchester, but could not read it; it was much too learned for me, and seemed rather an account of Babel than Manchester, I mean in point of antiquity.(207) To be sure, it is very kind in an author to promise one the history of a country town, and give one a circumstantial account of the antediluvian world into the bargain.  But I am simple and ignorant, and desire no more than I pay for.  And then for my progenitors, Noah and the Saxons, I have no curiosity about them.  Bishop Lyttelton used to plague me to death about barrows, and tumuli, and Roman camps, and all those bumps in the ground that do not amount to a most imperfect ichnography; but, in good truth, I am content with