Your fair critic in the coach reminds me of a Scotchman who assured me that he did not see much in Shakspeare.  I replied, I dare say not.  He felt the equivoke, lookd awkward, and reddish, but soon returnd to the attack, by saying that he thought Burns was as good as Shakspeare:  I said that I had no doubt he was—­to a Scotchman.  We exchangd no more words that day.—­Your account of the fierce faces in the Hanging, with the presumed interlocution of the Eagle and the Tyger, amused us greatly.  You cannot be so very bad, while you can pick mirth off from rotten walls.  But let me hear you have escaped out of your oven.  May the Form of the Fourth Person who clapt invisible wet blankets about the shoulders of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego, be with you in the fiery Trial.  But get out of the frying pan.  Your business, I take it, is bathing, not baking.

Let me hear that you have clamber’d up to Lover’s Seat; it is as fine in that neighbourhood as Juan Fernandez, as lonely too, when the Fishing boats are not out; I have sat for hours, staring upon a shipless sea.  The salt sea is never so grand as when it is left to itself.  One cock-boat spoils it.  A sea-mew or two improves it.  And go to the little church, which is a very protestant Loretto, and seems dropt by some angel for the use of a hermit, who was at once parishioner and a whole parish.  It is not too big.  Go in the night, bring it away in your portmanteau, and I will plant it in my garden.  It must have been erected in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three first converts; yet hath it all the appertenances of a church of the first magnitude, its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral in a nutshell.  Seven people would crowd it like a Caledonian Chapel.  The minister that divides the word there, must give lumping penny-worths.  It is built to the text of two or three assembled in my name.  It reminds me of the grain of mustard seed.  If the glebe land is proportionate, it may yield two potatoes.  Tythes out of it could be no more split than a hair.  Its First fruits must be its Last, for ’twould never produce a couple.  It is truly the strait and narrow way, and few there be (of London visitants) that find it.  The still small voice is surely to be found there, if any where.  A sounding board is merely there for ceremony.  It is secure from earthquakes, not more from sanctity than size, for ’twould feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a taper-worm would.  Go and see, but not without your spectacles.  By the way, there’s a capital farm house two thirds of the way to the Lover’s Seat, with incomparable plum cake, ginger beer, etc.  Mary bids me warn you not to read the Anatomy of Melancholy in your present low way.  You’ll fancy yourself a pipkin, or a headless bear, as Burton speaks of.  You’ll be lost in a maze of remedies for a labyrinth of diseasements, a plethora of cures.  Read Fletcher; above all the Spanish Curate, the Thief or Little Nightwalker,