The “Siege of Aquileia,” of which you ask, pleased less than Mr. Home’s other plays.[1] In my own opinion, “Douglas” far exceeds both the other.  Mr. Home seems to have a beautiful talent for painting genuine nature and the manners of his country.  There was so little of nature in the manners of both Greeks and Romans, that I do not wonder at his success being less brilliant when he tried those subjects; and, to say the truth, one is a little weary of them.  At present, nothing is talked of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and tedious performance:  it is a kind of novel, called “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy;"[2] the great humour of which consists in the whole narration always going backwards.  I can conceive a man saying that it would be droll to write a book in that manner, but have no notion of his persevering in executing it.  It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours.  The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever attempted and missed.  The best thing in it is a Sermon, oddly coupled with a good deal of coarseness, and both the composition of a clergyman.  The man’s head, indeed, was a little turned before, now topsy-turvy with his success and fame.  Dodsley has given him six hundred and fifty pounds for the second edition and two more volumes (which I suppose will reach backwards to his great-great-grandfather); Lord Fauconberg, a donative of one hundred and sixty pounds a-year; and Bishop Warburton[3] gave him a purse of gold and this compliment (which happened to be a contradiction), “that it was quite an original composition, and in the true Cervantic vein:”  the only copy that ever was an original, except in painting, where they all pretend to be so.  Warburton, however, not content with this, recommended the book to the bench of bishops, and told them Mr. Sterne, the author, was the English Rabelais.  They had never heard of such a writer.  Adieu!

[Footnote 1:  “Mr. Home’s other plays.” Mr. Home was a Presbyterian minister.  His first play was “The Tragedy of Douglas,” which D’Israeli describes as a drama which, “by awakening the piety of domestic affections with the nobler passions, would elevate and purify the mind;” and proceeds, with no little indignation, to relate how nearly it cost the author dear.  The “Glasgow divines, with the monastic spirit of the darkest ages, published a paper, which I abridge for the contemplation of the reader, who may wonder to see such a composition written in the eighteenth century:  ’On Wednesday, February 2, 1757, the Presbytery of Glasgow came to the following resolution:  They, having seen a printed paper intituled an admonition and exhortation of the reverend Presbytery of Edinburgh, which, among other evils prevailing, observed the following melancholy but notorious facts, that one who is a minister of the Church of Scotland did himself write and compose a stage play,