such it would be, is four times as large as the narrative in your hands, and I think Would not discredit me—­but, in truth, I am grown much fonder of truth than fame; and scribblers or their patrons shall not provoke me to sacrifice the one to the other.  Lord Hardwicke, I know, has long been my enemy,—­latterly, to get a sight of the Conway Papers, he has paid great court to me, which, to show how little I regarded his enmity, I let him see, at least the most curious.  But as I set as little value on his friendship, I did not grant another of his requests.  Indeed, I have made more than one foe by not indulging the vanity of those who have made application to me; and I am obliged to them, when they augment my contempt by quarrelling with me for that refusal.  It was the case of Mr. Masters, and is now of Lord Hardwicke.  He solicited me to reprint his Boeotian volume of Sir Dudley Carleton’s Papers, for which he had two motives.  The first he inherited from his father, the desire of saving money; for though his fortune is so much larger than mine, he knew I would not let out my press for hire, but should treat him with the expense, as I have done for those I have obliged.  The second was, that the rarity of my editions makes them valuable, and though I cannot make men read dull books, I can make them purchase them.  His lordship, therefore, has bad grace in affecting to overlook one, whom he had in vain courted, yet he again is grown my enemy, because I would not be my own.  For my Writings, they do not depend on him or the venal authors he patronizes (I doubt very frugally), but On their own merits or demerits.  It is from men of sense they must expect their sentence, not from boobies and hireling authors, whom I have always shunned, with the whole fry of minor wits, critics, and monthly censors.  I have not seen the Review you mention, nor ever do, but when something particular is pointed out to me.  Literary squabbles I know preserve one’s name, when one’s work will not; but I despise the fame that depends on scolding till one is remembered, and remembered by whom?  The scavengers of literature!  Reviewers are like sextons, who in a charnel-house can tell you to what John Thompson or to what Tom-Matthews such a skull or such belonged—­but who wishes to know?  The fame that is only to be found in such vaults, is like the fires that burn unknown in tombs, and go out as fast as they are discovered.  Lord Hardwicke is welcome to live among the dead if he likes’,,it, and can contrive to live nowhere else.

Chatterton did abuse me under the title of Baron of Otranto,(319) but unluckily the picture is more like Dr. Milles and Chatterton’s own devotees’ than to me, who am but a recreant antiquary, and, as the poor lad found by experience, did not swallow every fragment that ’Was offered to me as an antique; though that is a feature he has bestowed Upon me.