“I will send the pattern to-morrow, and since you don’t go to our friend (’of the keeping part of the town’) this evening, I shall e’en sulk at home over a solitary potation.  My self-opinion rises much by your eulogy of my social qualities.  As my friend Scrope is pleased to say, I believe I am very well for a ‘holiday drinker.’  Where the devil are you?  With Woolridge[61], I conjecture—­for which you deserve another abscess.  Hoping that the American war will last for many years, and that all the prizes may be registered at Bermoothes, believe me, &c.

“P.S.  I have just been composing an epistle to the Archbishop for an especial licence.  Oons! it looks serious.  Murray is impatient to see you, and would call, if you will give him audience.  Your new coat!—­I wonder you like the colour, and don’t go about, like Dives, in purple.”

[Footnote 51:  I had frequently, both in earnest and in jest, expressed these hopes to him; and, in one of my letters, after touching upon some matters relative to my own little domestic circle, I added, “This will all be unintelligible to you; though I sometimes cannot help thinking it within the range of possibility, that even you, volcano as you are, may, one day, cool down into something of the same habitable state.  Indeed, when one thinks of lava having been converted into buttons for Isaac Hawkins Browne, there is no saying what such fiery things may be brought to at last.”]

[Footnote 52:  Of the lamentable contrast between sentiments and conduct, which this transfer of the seat of sensibility from the heart to the fancy produces, the annals of literary men afford unluckily too many examples.  Alfieri, though he could write a sonnet full of tenderness to his mother, never saw her (says Mr. W. Rose) but once after their early separation, though he frequently passed within a few miles of her residence.  The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, was, it appears, a neglectful husband and harsh father; and Sterne (to use the words employed by Lord Byron) preferred “whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother.”]

[Footnote 53:  It is the opinion of Diderot, in his Treatise on Acting, that not only in the art of which he treats, but in all those which are called imitative, the possession of real sensibility is a bar to eminence;—­sensibility being, according to his view, “le caractere de la bonte de l’ame et de la mediocrite du genie.”]

[Footnote 54:  Pope.]

[Footnote 55:  See Foscolo’s Essay on Petrarch.  On the same principle, Orrery says, in speaking of Swift, “I am persuaded that his distance from his English friends proved a strong incitement to their mutual affection.”]

[Footnote 56:  That he was himself fully aware of this appears from a passage in one of his letters already given:—­“My sister is in town, which is a great comfort; for, never having been much together, we are naturally more attached to each other.”]