trary. But I find I am to take other measures with your Lordship; I am to stand upon my guard with you, and to approach you as warily as Horace did Augustus:

Cui malè si palpere, récalcitrat undique tutus.

An ill-timed or an extravagant commendation would not pass upon you; but you would keep off such a dedicator at arms' end, and send him back with his encomiums to this lord, or that lady, who stood in need of such trifling merchandise.

You see, my Lord, what an awe you have upon me, when I dare not offer you that incense which would be acceptable to other patrons; but am forced to curb myself from ascribing to you those honours which even an enemy could not deny you. Yet I must confess I never practised that virtue of moderation (which is properly your character) with so much reluctancy as now; for it hinders me from being true to my own knowledge, in not witnessing your worth; and deprives me of the only means which I had left to shew the world that true honour and uninteressed respect which I have always paid you. I would say somewhat, if it were possible, which might distinguish that veneration I have for you from the flatteries of those who adore your fortune; but the eminence of your condition in this particular is my unhappiness; for it renders whatever I would say suspected. Professions of service, submissions, and attendance, are the practice of all men to the great; and commonly

they who have the least sincerity perform them best, as they who are least engaged in love have their tongues the freest to counterfeit a passion for my own part, I never could shake off the rustick bashfulness which hangs upon my nature; but valuing myself as little as I am worth, have been afraid to render even the common duties of respect to those who are in power. The ceremonious visits which are generally paid on such occasions are not my talent. They may be real even in courtiers; but they appear with such a face of interest, that a modest man would think himself in danger of having his sincerity mistaken for his design. My congratulations keep their distance, and pass no farther than my heart. There it is that I have all the joy imaginable, when I see true worth rewarded, and virtue uppermost in the world.

If therefore there were one to whom I had the honour to be known, and to know him so perfectly, that I could say without flattery he had all the depth of understanding that was requisite in an able statesman, and all that honesty which commonly is wanting; that he was brave without vanity, and knowing without positiveness; that he was loyal to his prince, and a lover of his country; that his principles were full of moderation, and all his counsels such as tended to heal and not to widen the breaches of the nation: that in all his conversation there appeared a native candour, and a desire of doing good in all his actions; if such

an one whom I have described, were at the helm; if he had risen by his merits, and were chosen out in the necessity and pressure of affairs to remedy our confusions by the seasonableness of his advice, and to put a stop to our ruin when we were just rolling downward to the precipice, I should then congratulate the age in which I lived for the common safety; I should not despair of the republick, though Hannibal were at the gates; I should send up my vows for the success of such an action, as Virgil did on the like occasion for his patron, when he was raising up his country from the desolations of a civil war :

Hunc saltem everso juvenem succurrere seclo,

Ne, superi, prohibete.

I know not whither I am running, in this ecstacy which is now upon me; I am almost ready to reassume the ancient rights of poetry; to point out and prophecy the man who was born for no less an undertaking, and whom posterity shall bless for its accomplishment. Methinks I am already taking fire from such a character, and making room for him, under a borrowed name amongst the heroes of an epick poem. Neither could mine, or some more happy genius, want encouragement under such a patron:

Pollio amat nostram, quamvis est rustica, musam.

But these are considerations afar off, my Lord: the former part of the prophecy must be first accomplished, the quiet of the nation must be

secured, and a mutual trust betwixt prince and people be renewed; and then this great and good man will have leisure for the ornaments of peace, and make our language as much indebted to his care, as the French is to the memory of their famous Richelieu. You know, my Lord, how low he laid the foundations of so great a work; that he began it with a Grammar and a Dictionary; without which all those remarks and observations which have since been made, had been performed to as little purpose as it would be to consider the furniture of the rooms before the contrivance of the house. Propriety must first be stated, ere any measures of elegance can be taken. Neither is one Vaugelas sufficient for such a work; it was the employment of the whole Academy for many years; for the perfect knowledge of a tongue was never attained by any single person. The court, the college, and the town, must be joined in it. And as our English is a composition of the dead and living tongues, there is required a perfect knowledge not only of the Greek and Latin, but of the old German, the French, and the Italian ; and to

Claude Favre, Seigneur de Vaugelas, who died in 1649; author of Remarks on the French Language.

9" Of the twenty-two thousand words in the English language, (says Mr. Spence in his ANECDOTES,) there are about 15,000 which every man understands, who is before master of Latin and French and Italian; and three thousand more which he understands, if he be master of German. The other four thousand are probably the old British."

help all these, a conversation with those authors of our own, who have written with the fewest faults in prose and verse. But how barbarously we yet write and speak, your Lordship knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English. For I am often put to a stand in considering whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue, or false. grammar, and nonsense, couched beneath that specious name of Anglicism; and have no other way to clear my doubts but by translating my English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense the words will bear in a more stable language. I am desirous, if it were possible, that we might all write with the same certainty of words and purity of phrase, to which the Italians first arrived, and after them the French; at least that we might advance so far as our tongue is capable of such a standard. It would mortify an Englishman to consider, that from the time of Boccace and of Petrarch, the Italian has varied very little; and that the English of Chaucer, their contemporary, is not to be understood without the help of an old Dictionary. But their Goth and Vandal had the fortune to be graffed on a Roman stock; ours has the disadvantage to be founded on the Dutch. We are full of monosyllables, and those clogged with consonants; and our pronunciation is effeminate all which are enemies to a sounding language. It is true that, to supply our poverty, we have trafficked with our neighbour nations, by