Mr. Browne Willis:  I shall value it not only as I am a collector, but because he was your friend.  What shall I say about Mr. Gough?  He is not a pleasant man, and I doubt will tease me about many things, some of which I have never cared about, and all which I interest myself little about now, when I seek to pass my remnant in the most indolent tranquillity.  He has not been very civil to me, he worships the fools I despise, and I conceive has no genuine taste; yet as to trifling resentments, when the objects have not acted with bad hearts, I can most readily lose them.  Please Mr. Gough, I certainly shall not; I cannot be very grave about such idle studies as his and my own, and am apt to be impatient, or laugh when people imagine I am serious about them.  But there is a stronger reason why I shall not satisfy Mr. Gough.  He is a man to minute down whatever one tells him that he may call information, and whip it into his next publication.  However, though I am naturally very frank, I can regulate myself by those I converse with; and as I shall be on my guard, I will not decline visiting Mr. Gough, as it would be illiberal or look surly if I refused.  You shall have the merit, if you please, of my assent; and shall tell him, I shall be glad to see him any morning at eleven o’clock.  This will save you the trouble of sending me his new work, as I conclude he will mention it to me.

I more willingly assure you that I shall like to see Mr. Steevens,(465) and to show him Strawberry.  You never sent me a person you commended, that I did not find deserved it.

You will be surprised when I tell you, that I have only dipped into Mr. Bryant’s book, and lent the Dean’s before I had cut the leaves, though I had peeped into it enough to see that I shall not read it.  Both he and Bryant are so diffuse on our antiquated literature, that I had rather believe in Rowley than go through their proofs.  Dr. Warton and Mr. Tyrwhitt have more patience, and intend to answer them—­and so the controversy will be two hundred years out of my reach.  Mr. Bryant, I did find, begged a vast many questions, which proved to me his own doubts.  Dr. Glynn’s foolish evidence made me laugh, and so did Mr. Bryant’s sensibility for me; he says that Chatterton treated me very cruelly in one of his writings.  I am sure I did not feel it so.  I suppose Bryant means under the title of Baron of Otranto, which is written with humour.  I must have been the sensitive plant if any thing in that character had hurt me!  Mr. Bryant too, and the Dean, as I see by extracts in the papers, have decorated Chatterton with sanctimonious honour—­think of that young rascal’s note, when, summing up his gains and losses by writing for and against Beckford, he says, “Am glad he is dead by three pounds 13 shillings 6pence.”  There was a lad of too nice honour to be capable of forgery! and a lad who, they do not deny, forged the poems in the style of Ossian, and fifty other things.