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The original letter is unlocated, a copy, transcription, or published version survives
Julian
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This letter is part of the correspondence calendar of the complete correspondence of Thomas Gray. The calendar contains detailed bibliographic records for all known original, copied, or published letters written by or to the poet as well as the full-text, where available. Each record is accompanied by digitised images of the manuscript, where available, or digitised images of the first printed edition.
It is a misfortune to me to be at a distance from both of you at present. A letter can give one so little idea of such matters! [ ] I always believed well of his heart and temper, and would gladly do so still. If they are as they should be, I should have expected every thing from such an explanation; for it is a tenet with me (a simple one, you'll perhaps say), that if ever two people, who love one another, come to breaking, it is for want of a timely eclaircissement, a full and precise one, without witnesses or mediators, and without reserving any one disagreeable circumstance for the mind to brood upon in silence.
I am not totally of your mind as to Mr. Lyttleton's Elegy, though I love kids and fawns as little as you do. If it were all like the fourth stanza, I should be
excessively pleased. Nature and sorrow, and tenderness, are the true genius of such things; and something of these I find in several
parts of it (not in the orange-tree): poetical ornaments are foreign to the purpose; for they only
show a man is not sorry;–and devotion worse; for it teaches him, that he ought not to be sorry, which is all the pleasure of the
thing. I beg leave to turn your weathercock the contrary way. Your Epistle I have not seen a great
while, and doctor M. is not in the way to give me a sight of it: but I remember enough to be sure all
the world will be pleased with it, even with all its faults upon its head, if you don't care to mend them. I
would try to do it myself (however hazardous), rather than it should remain unpublished. As to my Eton Ode, Mr. Dodsley is padrone. The second you had, I
suppose you do not think worth giving him: otherwise, to me it seems not worse than the former. He might have Selima too, unless she be of too little importance for his patriot-collection; or perhaps the connections you had with her may interfere. Che so io? Adieu!