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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.
I send your Reverence the lesson, wch is pure good-nature on my part, knowing already as I do, that
you don't like it. no sooner do people feel their income increase than they want amusement! why what need have you of any other, than
to sit like a Japonese Divinity with your hands folded on your fat belly wrap'd & (as it were) annihilated in the contemplation of
your own corpses
and revenues? the Pentagrapher is gone to Town, so you have
nothing to do but to go & multiply in your own vulgar way: only don't fall to work, & forget to say grace.
The Laureat has honour'd me, (as a Friend of yours, for I know no other reason) with his new Play & his Charge to the Poets, the first very middleing; the second I am pleased with, chiefly with the sense, & sometimes with the verse & expression: and yet the best thing he ever wrote was that Elegy against Friendship you once shew'd me, where the sense was detestable; so that you see it is not at all necessary a Poet should be a good sort of Man, no, not even in his writings. Bob Lloyd has publish'd his works in a just quarto volume, containing among other things a Latin Translation of my Elegy; an Epistle in wch is a very serious compliment to me by name, particularly on my Pindaric accomplishments; & the very two Odes you saw before, in which we were abused; & a note to say, they were written in concert with his Friend Mr Coleman: so little value have poets for themselves, especially when they would make up a just volume. Mr Delap is here & has brought his cub to Trinity. he has pick'd up again purely since his misfortune, & is fat & well, all but a few bowels. he says, Mrs Pritchard spoilt his Hecuba with sobbing so much; & that she was really so moved, that she fell in fits behind the scenes. I much like Dr Lowth's Grammar: it is concise, clear, & elegant. he has selected his Solecisms from all the best Writers of our Tongue. I hear Mr Hurd is seriously writing against Fingal by the instigation of the Devil & the B:p. can it be true? I have exhausted all my litterary news, & I have no other.
Mr Brown has got a cap, & hopes for a suitable hood. you must write a line to tell him how to send them. I go to Town on Monday, but direct to me here.