[Footnote 1:  MS. torn here.]

To RICHARD BENTLEY

Pictures and Garrick

Strawberry Hill, 15 Aug. 1755.

MY DEAR SIR,

Though I wrote to you so lately, and have certainly nothing new to tell you, I can’t help scribbling a line to you to-night, as I am going to Mr. Rigby’s for a week or ten days, and must thank you first for the three pictures.  One of them charms me, the Mount Orgueil, which is absolutely fine; the sea, and shadow upon it, are masterly.  The other two I don’t, at least won’t, take for finished.  If you please, Elizabeth Castle shall be Mr. Muentz’s performance:  indeed I see nothing of you in it.  I do reconnoitre you in the Hercules and Nessus; but in both, your colours are dirty, carelessly dirty:  in your distant hills you are improved, and not hard.  The figures are too large—­I don’t mean in the Elizabeth Castle, for there they are neat; but the centaur, though he dies as well as Garrick can, is outrageous.  Hercules and Deianira are by no means so:  he is sentimental, and she most improperly sorrowful.  However, I am pleased enough to beg you would continue.  As soon as Mr. Muentz returns from the Vine, you shall have a good supply of colours.  In the meantime why give up the good old trade of drawing?  Have you no Indian ink, no soot-water, no snuff, no coat of onion, no juice of anything?  If you love me, draw:  you would if you knew the real pleasure you can give me.  I have been studying all your drawings; and next to architecture and trees, I determine that you succeed in nothing better than animals.  Now (as the newspapers say) the late ingenious Mr. Seymour is dead, I would recommend horses and greyhounds to you.  I should think you capable of a landscape or two with delicious bits of architecture.  I have known you execute the light of a torch or lanthorn so well, that if it was called Schalken, a housekeeper at Hampton Court or Windsor, or a Catherine at Strawberry Hill, would show it, and say it cost ten thousand pounds.  Nay, if I could believe that you would ever execute any more designs I proposed to you, I would give you a hint for a picture that struck me t’other day in Perefixe’s Life of Henry IV.  He says, the king was often seen lying upon a common straw-bed among the soldiers, with a piece of brown bread in one hand, and a bit of charcoal in t’other, to draw an encampment, or town that he was besieging.  If this is not character and a picture, I don’t know what is.

I dined to-day at Garrick’s:  there were the Duke of Grafton, Lord and Lady Rochford, Lady Holderness, the crooked Mostyn, and Dabreu the Spanish minister; two regents, of which one is lord chamberlain, the other groom of the stole; and the wife of a secretary of state.  This is being sur un assez bon ton for a player!  Don’t you want to ask me how I like him?  Do want, and I will tell you.—­I like her exceedingly; her behaviour is all sense,