vagary, by those who had seen their fathers live very comfortably upon acorns.  Nor is there any harm in starting new game to invention:  many excellent discoveries have been made by men who were a la chasse of something very different.  I am not quite sure that the art of making gold and of* living for ever have been yet found out:  yet to how many noble discoveries has the pursuit of those nostrums given birth!  Poor chymistry, had she not had such glorious objects in view!  If you are sitting under a cowslip at your cottage, these reveries may amuse you for half an hour, at least make you smile; and for the ease of your conscience, which is always in a panic, they require no answer.(681)

I will not ask you about the new history of Bristol,(682) because you are too good a citizen to say a word against your native place; but do pray cast your eye on the prints of The cathedral and castle, the chef-d’,oeuvres of Chatterton’s ignorance, and of Mr. Barrett’s too; and on two letters pretended to have been sent to me, and which never were sent.  If my incredulity had wavered, they would have fixed it.  I wish the milkwoman would assert that Boadicea’s dairymaid had invented Dutch tiles; it would be like Chatterton’s origin of heraldry and painted glass, in those two letters.  I must, however, mention one word about myself.  In the new fourth volume of the Biographia Britannica I am more candidly treated about that poor lad than usual:  yet the writer still affirms, that, according to my own account, my reply was too much in the-commonplace style of court replies.  Now my own words, and the truth, as they stand in print in the very letter of mine which this author quotes, were, “I wrote him a letter with as much kindness and tenderness as if I had been his guardian.”  Is this by my own account a court-reply?  Nor did I conceive, for I never was a courtier, that courtiers are wont to make tender replies to the poor; I am glad to hear they do.

I have kept this letter some days in my writing-box, till I could meet with a stray member of parliament, for it is not worth making you pay for:  but when you talk to me I cannot help answering incontinently; besides, can one take up a letter at a long distance, and heat one’s reply over again with the same interest that it occasioned at first?  Adieu!  I wish you may come to Hampton before I leave these purlieus!  Yours More and More.

(680) Miss More had written to Walpole,—­“Poor France! though I am sorry that the lawless rabble are so triumphant, I cannot help hoping that some good will arise from the sum of human misery having been so considerably lessened at one blow by the destruction of the Bastille.  The utter extinction of the Inquisition, and the redemption of Africa, I hope yet to see accomplished.”  Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 170.-E.

(681) To this passage Miss More thus replies:—­“Your project for relieving our poor slaves by machine work is so far from being wild or chimerical, that of three persons deep and able in the concern (Mr. Wilberforce among others), not one but has thought it rational and practicable, and that a plough may be so constructed as to save much misery.”  Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 187.-,E.