Adieu! though I am very angry with you, I deserve all your friendship, by that I have for you, witness my anger and disappointment.  Yours ever.

P. S. Send me your new direction, and tell me when I must begin to use it.

(1021) The Mysterious Mother.  See vol. i. p. 57.-E.

(1022) Of this tragedy Lord Byron was also an approver:  “It is the fashion,” he says, “to underrate Horace Walpole; firstly, because he was a nobleman; and secondly, because he was a gentleman; but, to say nothing of the composition of his incomparable Letters, and of the Castle of Otranto, he is the ultimus Romanorum, the author of the Mysterious Mother; a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love.play."-E.

(1023) This celebrated actress, who excelled alike in tragedy and comedy, took leave of the stage in May, in the part of Lady Macbeth, and died at Bath in the following August.-E.

(1024) Walpole, in a letter to Madame du Deffand, of the 11th of March, speaking of the “Honn`ete Criminel,” a copy of which she had sent him, gives her the following account of his own tragedy:—­“L’Honn`ete Criminel me paroit assez m`ediocre.  Ma propre trag`edie a de bien plus grands d`efauts, mais au moins elle ne ressemble pas au toout compass`e tet r`egl`e du si`ecle.  Il ne vous plairoit pas assur`ement; il n’y a pas de beaux Sentiments:  il n’y a que des passions sans envelope, des crimes, des repentis, et des horreurs.  Je crois qu’il y a beaucoup plus de mauvais que de bon, et je sais s`urement que depuis le premier acte jusqu’a la derni`ere sc`ene l’int`er`et languit au lieu d’augmenter:  peut-il avoir on plus grand d`efaut?"-E.

(1025) Corn`elie, a manuscript tragedy, written by the Pr`esident Henault in early life.

(1026) He died in Novembor 1770, at the age of eighty-six.-E.

Letter 341 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.  Strawberry Hill, April 16, 1768. (page 517)

Well, dear Sir, does your new habitation improve as the spring advances?  There has been dry weather and east wind enough to parch the fens.  We find that the severe beginning of this last winter has made terrible havoc among the evergreens, though of old standing.  Half my cypresses have been bewitched, and turned into brooms; and the laurustinus is every where perished.  I am Goth enough to choose now and then to believe in prognostics; and I hope this destruction imports, that, though foreigners should take root here, they cannot last in this climate.  I would fain persuade myself, that we are to be our own empire to eternity.