would have tried to copy; and that is the cupolas which cover every thing, baths, apartments, and even kitchens; yet who ever saw a Gothic cupola? It is a thing plainly of Greek original. I do not see any thing but the slender spires that serve for steeples, which may perhaps be borrowed from the Saracen minarets on their mosques.

I take it ill you should say any thing against the Mole, it is a reflection I see cast at the Thames. Do you think that rivers, which have lived in London and its neighbourhood all their days, will run roaring and tumbling about like your tramontane torrents in the north? No, they only glide and whisper.

LXXXVIII.

TO DR. WHARTON.

Cambridge, March 9, 1755.

As

I Do not pretend to humble any one's pride; I love my own too well to attempt it. to mortifying their vanity, it is too easy and too mean a task for me to delight in. You are very good in showing so much sensibi

lity on my account; but be assured my taste for praise is not like that of children for fruit; if there were nothing but medlars and blackberries in the world, I could be very well content to go without any at all. I dare say that Mason, though some years younger than I, was as little elevated with the approbation of lord ** and lord * *, as I am mortified by their silence.

With regard to publishing, I am not so much against the thing itself, as of publishing this ode alone.* I have two or three ideas more in my head; what is to come of them? Must they too come out in the shape of little sixpenny flams, dropping one after another till Mr. Dodsley thinks fit to collect them with Mr. This's Song, and Mr. Tother's epigram into a pretty volume? I am sure Mason must be sensible of this, and therefore cannot mean what he says; neither am I quite of your opinion with regard to strophe and antistrophe;† setting aside the

* His Ode on the Progress of Poetry.

He often made the same remark to me in conversation, which jed me to form the last ode of Caractacus in shorter stanzas: but we must not imagine that he thought the regular Pindaric method without its use; though as he justly says, when formed in long stanzas, it does not fully succeed in point of effect on the ear: for there was nothing which he more disliked than that chain of irre

difficulty of execution, methinks it has little or no effect on the ear, which scarce perceives the regular return of metres at so great a distance from one another: to make it succeed, I am persuaded the stanzas must not consist of above nine lines each at the most.-Pindar has several such odes.

LXXXIX.

TO MR. STONHEWER.

*

August 21, 1755.

I THANK you for your intelligence about Herculaneum, which was the first news I received of it. I have since turned over

gular stanzas which Cowley introduced. and falsely called Pindaric; and which, from the extreme facility of execution, produced a number of miserable imitators Had the regular return of strope, antistrophe, and epode no other merit than that of extreme difficulty, it ought, on this very account, to be valued; becaus we well know that " easy writing is no easy reading." It is also to be remarked, that Mr. Congreve, who (though withont any lyrical powers) first introduced the regular Pindaric form into the English language, made use of the short stanzas which Mr Gray here recommends See his ode to the queen

*Afterwards aud tor of excise. His friendship with Mr. Gray commenced at college, and continued till the death of the latter.

monsignor Baiardi's book,* where I have learned how many grains of modern wheat the Roman congius, in the capitol, holds, and how many thousandth parts of an inch the Greek foot consisted of more (or less, for I forgot which) than our own. He proves also by many affecting examples, that an antiquary may be mistaken: that, for any thing any body knows, this place under ground might be some other place, and not Herculaneum; but nevertheless, that he can show for certain, that it was this place and no other place; that it is hard to say which of the several Hercules's was the founder; therefore (in the third volume) he promises. to give us the memoirs of them all; and after that, if we do not know what to think of the matter, he will tell us. There is a great deal of wit too, and satire, and verses, in the book, which is intended chiefly for the information of the French king, who will be greatly edified without doubt.

I believe the book here ridiculed was published by the authority of the king of Naples. But afterwards, on finding how ill qualified the author was to execute the task, the business of describing the antiquities found at Herculaneum was put into other hands; who have certainly, as far as they have gone, performed it much better.

I am much obliged to you also for Voltaire's performance; it is very unequal, as he is apt to be in all but his dramas, and looks like the work of a man that will admire his retreat and his Leman-Lake no longer than till he finds an opportunity to leave it:* however, though there be many parts which I do not like, yet it is in several places excellent, and every where above mediocrity. As you have the politeness to pretend impatience, and desire I would communicate, and all that, I annex a piece of the prophecy;† which must be true at least, as it was wrote so many hundred years after the events.

XC.

TO DR. WHARTON.

Pembroke-Hall, March 25, 1756.

THOUGH I had no reasonable excuse for myself before I received your last letter, yet since that time I have had a pretty good one; having been taken up in quarrelling with

* I do not recollect the title of this poem, but it was a small one which M. de Voltaire wrote when he first settled at Ferney.

The second antistrophe and epode, with a few lines of the third strophe of his ode, entitled the Bard, were here inserted.