However melancholy the occasion is, I can but give you a thousand thanks, dear Sir-., for the kind trouble you have taken, and the information you have given me about poor Mr. Gray.  I received your first letter at Paris; the last I found at my house in town, where I arrived only on Friday last.  The circumstance of the professor refusing to rise in the night and visit him, adds to the shock.  Who is that true professor of physic?  Jesus! is their absence to murder as well as their presence?

I have not heard from Mr. Mason, but I have written to him.  Be so good as to tell the Master at Pembroke,(65) though I have not the honour of knowing him, how sensible I am of his proposed attention to me, and how much I feel for him in losing a friend of so excellent a genius.  Nothing will allay my own concern like seeing any of his compositions that I have not yet seen.  It is buying them too dear—­but when the author is irreparably lost, the produce of his Mind is the next best possession.  I have offered my press to Mr. Mason, and hope it will be accepted.

Many thanks for the cross, dear Sir; it is precisely what I wished.  I hope you and Mr. Essex preserve your resolution of passing a few days here between this and Christmas.  Just at present I am not My own master, having stepped into the middle of a sudden match in my own family.  Lord Hertford is going to marry his third daughter to Lord Villiers, son of Lady Grandison, the present wife of Sir Charles Montagu.  We are all felicity, and in a round of dinners.  I am this minute returned from Beaumont-lodge, at Old Windsor, where Sir Charles Grandison lives.  I will let you know, if the papers do not, when our festivities are subsided.

I shall receive with gratitude from Mr. Tyson either drawing or etching of our departed friend; but wish not to have it inscribed to me, as it is an honour, more justly due to Mr. Stonehewer.  If the Master of Pembroke will accept a copy of a small picture I have of Mr. Gray, painted soon after the publication of his Ode on Eton, it shall be at his service—­and after his death I beg, it may be bequeathed to his college.  Adieu!

(65) Dr. James Brown.  Gray used to call him “le petit bon homme;” and Cole, in his Athene Cantab, says of him—­“He is a very worthy man, a good scholar, small, and short-sighted.”  In the Chatham Correspondence there will be found an interesting letter from the Master of Pembroke to Lord Chatham, in which he thus speaks of his illustrious son, the future minister of this country:  " Notwithsanding the illness of your son, I have myself seen, and have heard enough from his tutors, to be convinced both of his extraordinary genius and most amiable disposition.  He promises fair, indeed to be one of those extraordinary persons whose eminent parts, equalled by as eminent industry, continue in a progressive state throughout their lives; such persons appear to be formed by Heaven to assist and bless mankind.”  Vol. iv. p. 311.-E.