paragraph on that subject.  Dictionary writer I suppose alludes to Johnson; but surely you do not equal the compiler of a dictionary to a genuine poet?  Is a brickmaker on a level with Mr. Essex?  Nor can I hold that exquisite wit and satire are Billingsgate; if they were, Milles and Johnson would be able to write an answer to the epistle.  I do as little guess whom you mean that got a pension by Toryism:  if Johnson too, he got a pension for having abused pensioners, and yet took one himself, which was contemptible enough.  Still less know I who preferred opposition to principles, which is not a very common case; whoever it was, as Pope says,

“The way he took was strangely round about.”

With Mr. Chamberlayne I was very little acquainted, nor ever saw him six times in my life.  It was with Lord Walpole’s branch he was intimate, and to whose eldest son Mr. Chamberlayne had been tutor.  This poor gentleman had a most excellent character universally, and has been more feelingly regretted than almost any man I ever knew.(476) This is all I am able to tell you.  I forgot to say, I am also in the, dark as to the person you guess for the author of the Epistle. it cannot be the same person to whom it is generally attributed; who certainly neither has a pension nor has deserted his principles, nor has reason to be jealous of those he laughed at; for their abilities are far below his.  I do not mean that it is his, but is attributed to him.  It was sent to me; nor did I ever see a line of it till I read it in print.  In one respect it is most credible to be his; for there are not two such inimitable poets in England.(477) I smiled on reading it, and said to myself, “Dr. Glynn is well off to have escaped!” His language Indeed about me has been Billingsgate; but peace be to his and the manes of Rowley, if they have ghosts who never existed.  The Epistle has not put an end to that controversy, which was grown so tiresome.  I rejoice at having kept my resolution of not writing a word more on that subject.  The Dean had swollen it to an enormous bladder; the Archaeologic poet pricked it with a pin; a sharp one indeed, and it burst.  Pray send me a better account of yourself if you can.

(475) The resignation of Lord North, and the formation of the Rockingham administration.-E.

(476) Edward Chamberlayne, Esq. recently appointed secretary of the treasury.  He was so overcome by a nervous terror of the responsibility of the office, that he committed suicide, by throwing himself out of a window on the 6th of April.  On the following day, Hannah More sent the subjoined account of this melancholy event to her sister:—­“Chamberlayne! the amiable, the accomplished, the virtuous, the religious Chamberlayne! in the full vigour of his age, high in reputation, happy in his prospects, threw him self out of the Treasury window, was taken up alive, and lived thirty-six hours in the most perfect possession of his mental activity, his religion, and his reasoning