Sir,—­Every letter I receive from you is a new obligation, bringing me new information:  but, sure, my Catalogue was not worthy of giving you so much trouble.  Lord Fortescue is quite new to me; I have sent him to the press.  Lord Dorset’s[1] poem it will be unnecessary to mention separately, as I have already said that his works are to be found among those of the minor poets.

[Footnote 1:  Lord Dorset, Lord Chamberlain under Charles II., author of the celebrated ballad “To all you ladies now on land,” and patron of Dryden and other literary men, was honourably mentioned as such by Macaulay in c. 8 of his “History,” and also for his refusal, as Lord-Lieutenant of Essex, to comply with some of James’s illegal orders.]

I don’t wonder, Sir, that you prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius[1]; nor can two authors well be more unlike:  the former wrote a general history in a most obscure and almost unintelligible style; the latter, a portion of private history, in the noblest style in the world.  Whoever made the comparison, I will do them the justice to believe that they understood bad Greek better than their own language in its elevation.  For Dr. Jortin’s[2] Erasmus, which I have very nearly finished, it has given me a good opinion of the author, and he has given me a very bad one of his subject.  By the Doctor’s labour and impartiality, Erasmus appears a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover truth, and not courage enough to profess it:  whose vanity made him always writing; yet his writings ought to have cured his vanity, as they were the most abject things in the world. Good Erasmus’s honest mean was alternate time-serving.  I never had thought much about him, and now heartily despise him.

[Footnote 1:  “You prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius.” It is hard to understand this sentence.  Lord Clarendon did not write a general history, but an account of a single event, “The Great Rebellion.”  It was Polybius who wrote a “Universal History,” of which, however, only five books have been preserved, the most interesting portion of which is a narrative of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy and march over the Alps in the Second Punic War.]

[Footnote 2:  Dr. Jortin was Archdeacon of London; and, among other works, had recently published a life of the celebrated Erasmus, the mention of whom by Pope, which Walpole presently quotes, is not very unfairly interpreted by Walpole.]

When I speak my opinion to you, Sir, about what I dare say you care as little for as I do, (for what is the merit of a mere man of letters?) it is but fit I should answer you as sincerely on a question about which you are so good as to interest yourself.  That my father’s life is likely to be written, I have no grounds for believing.  I mean I know nobody that thinks of it.  For, myself, I certainly shall not, for many reasons, which you must have the patience to hear.  A reason to me myself is, that