Your partiality, I doubt, Sir, has induced you to insert a paper not so worthy of the public regard as the rest of your splendid performance.  My letter to Mr. Cole,(573) which I am sure I had utterly forgotten .to have ever written, was a hasty indigested sketch, like the rest of my scribblings, and never calculated to lead such well-meditated and accurate works as yours.  Having lived familiarly with Mr. Cole, from our boyhood, I used to write to him carelessly on the occasions that occurred.  As it was always on subjects of’ no importance, I never thought of enjoining secrecy.  I could not foresee that such idle Communications would find a place in a great national work, or I should have been more attentive to ’what I said.  Your taste, Sir, I fear, has for once been misled; and I shall be sorry for having innocently blemished a single page.  Since your partiality (for such it certainly was) has gone so far, I flatter myself you will have retained enough to accept, not a retribution, but a trifling mark of my regard, in the little volume that accompanies this; in which you will find that another too favourable reader has bestowed on me more distinction than I could procure for myself, by turning my slight Essay on Gardening(574) into the pure French of the last age;(575) and, which is wonderful, has not debased Milton by French poetry:  on the contrary, I think Milton has given a dignity to French poetry—­nay, and harmony; both which I thought that language almost incapable of receiving.  As I would wish to give all the value I can to my offering, I Will mention, that I have printed but four hundred copies, half of which went to France; and as this is an age in which mere rarities are preferred to commoner things of intrinsic worth,-as I have found by the ridiculous prices given for some of my insignificant publications, merely because they are scarce,-I hope, under the title of a kind of curiosity, my thin piece will be admitted into your library.  If you would indulge me so far, Sir, as to let me know when I might hope to see the second part, I would calculate how many more fits of the gout I may weather, and would be still more strict in my regimen.  I hope, at least, that you will not wait for the engravers, but will accomplish the text for the sake of the world:  in this I speak disinterestedly.  Though you are much younger than I am, I would have your part of the work secure — engravers may always proceed, or be found; another author cannot.

(572) The first volume of Mr. Gough’s “Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain."-E.

(573) See vol. iii., Aug. 12, 1769, letter 366.-E.

(574) The author of “The Pursuits of Literature",—­

“Well pleased to see
Walpole and Nature may, for once, agree,”

adds, in a note, “read (it well deserves the attention) that quaint, but most curious and learned writer’s excellent Essay on Modern Gardening."-E.

(575) Besides Walpole’s Essay on Modern Gardening, the Duc do Nivernois translated Pope’s Essay on Man, and a portion of Milton’s Paradise Lost, into French verse.-E.