(857) Charles the First used to call Dobson the English Tintoret.  He is said to have been the first painter who introduced the practice of obliging persons who sat to him to pay half the price in advance.-E.

344 letter 121 To Sir Horace Mann.  Newmarket, Oct. 3, 1743.

I am writing to you in an inn on the road to London.  What a paradise should I have thought this when I was in the Italian inns in a wide barn with four ample windows, which had nothing more like glass than shutters and iron bars ’ no tester to the bed, and the saddles and portmanteaus heaped on me to keep off the cold.  What a paradise did I think the inn at Dover when I came back! and what magnificence Were twopenny prints, saltcellars, and boxes to hold the knives:  but the summum bonum was small-beer and the newspaper.

“I bless’d my stars, and called it luxury!”

Who was the Neapolitan ambassadress (858) that could not live at Paris, because there was no maccaroni?  Now am I relapsed into all the dissatisfied repinement of a true English grumbling voluptuary.  I could find in my heart to write a Craftsman against the Government, because I am not quite so much at my ease as on my own sofa.  I could persuade myself that it is my Lord Carteret’s fault that I am only sitting in a common arm-chair, when I would be lolling in a p`ech`e-mortel.  How dismal, how solitary, how scrub does this town look and yet it has actually a street of houses better than Parma or Modena.  Nay, the houses of the people of fashion, who come hither for the races, are palaces to what houses in London itself were fifteen years ago.  People do begin to live again now, and I suppose in a term we shall revert to York Houses, Clarendon Houses, etc.  But from that grandeur all the nobility had contracted themselves to live in coops of a dining-room, a dark back-room, with one eye in a corner, and a closet.  Think what London would be, if the chief houses were in it, as in the cities in other countries, and not dispersed like great rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country.  Well, it is a tolerable place as it is!  Were I a physician, I would prescribe nothing but recipe, CCCLXV drachm.  Linden.  Would you know why I like London so much?  Why if the world must consist of so many fools as it does, I choose to take them in the gross, and not made into separate pills, as they are prepared in the country.  Besides, there is no being alone but in a metropolis:  the worst place in the world to find solitude is in the country:  questions grow there, and that unpleasant Christian commodity, neighbours.  Oh! they are all good Samaritans, and do so pour balms and nostrums upon one, if one has but the toothache, or a journey to take, that they break one’s head.  A journey to take-ay! they talk over the miles to you, and tell you, you will be late and My Lord Lovel says, John always goes two hours in the dark in the morning, to avoid being One hour in the dark in the evening.  I was pressed to set out to-day before seven:  I did before nine; and here am I arrived at a quarter past five, for the rest of the night.