your professor of poetry; a Mr. B*** and a Mr. C*** a man that never utters a syllable.  We have tried all stratagems to make him speak.  Yesterday he did at last open his mouth, and said Bec. all laughed so at the novelty of the thing that he shut it again, and will never speak more.  I think you can’t complain now of my not writing to you.  What a volume of trifles!  I wrote just the fellow to it from Geneva; had it you?  Farewell!  Thine.

(172) This incident is described also by Gray in one of his letters to his mother.  “If the dog,” he adds, “had not been there, and the creature had thought fit to lay hold of one of the horses, chaise and we, and all, must inevitably have tumbled above fifty fathoms perpendicularly down the precipice."-E.

(173) This representation is also mentioned by Spence, in a letter to his mother:-"In spite of the excellence,” he says, “of the actors, the greatest part of the entertainment to me was the countenances of the people in the pit and boxes.  When the devils were like to carry off the Damned Soul, every body was in the utmost consternation and when St. John spoke so obligingly to her, they were ready to cry out for joy.  When the Virgin appeared on the stage, every body looked respectful; and, on several words spoke by the actors, they pulled off, their hats, and crossed themselves.  What can you think of a people, where their very farces are religious, and where they are so religiously received?  It was from such a play as this (called Adam and Eve) that Milton when he was in Italy, is said to have taken the first hint for his divine poem of “Paradise Lost.”  What small beginnings are there sometimes to the greatest things!-E.

(174) In the manuscript the writing of this word is extraordinary tall.

(175) Henry ninth Earl of Lincoln, who having, in 1744, married Catherine, eldest daughter and heiress of the Right Honourable Henry Pelham, inherited, in 1768, the dukedom of Newcastle-under-Line at the demise of the countess’s uncle, Thomas Pelham Holles, who, in 1756, had been created Duke of Newcastle-under-Line, with special remainder to the Earl of Lincoln.-E.

(176) The Rev. Joseph Spence, the author of one of the best collections of ana the English language possesses-the well-known “Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men,” of which the best edition is that edited by Singer.-E.

140 Letter 15 To Richard West, Esq. >From Bologna, 1739.

I don’t know why I told Ashton I would send you an account of what I saw:  don’t believe it, I don’t intend it.  Only think what a vile employment ’tis, making catalogues!  And then one should have that odious Curl (177) get at one’s letters, and publish them like Whitfield’s Journal, or for a supplement to the Traveller’s Pocket Companion.  Dear West, I protest against having seen any thing but what all the world has seen; nay, I have not seen half that, not-some of the most