381 Letter 144 To Sir Horace Mann.  Arlington Street, July 22, 1744.

I have not written to you, my dear child, a good while, I know but, indeed, it was from having nothing to tell you.  You know I love you too well for it to be necessary to be punctually proving it to you; so, when I have nothing worth your knowing, I repose myself upon’ the persuasion that you must have of my friendship.  But I will never let that grow into any negligence, I should say, idleness, which is always mighty ready to argue me out of every thing I ought to do; and letter-writing is one of the first duties that the very best people let perish out of their rubric.  Indeed, I pride myself extremely in having been so good a correspondent; for, besides that every day grows to make one hate writing, more, it is difficult, you must own, to keep up a correspondence of this sort with any spirit, when long absence makes one entirely out of all the little circumstances of each other’s society, and which are the soul of letters.  We are forced to deal only in great events, like historians; and, instead of being Horace Mann and Horace Walpole, seem to correspond as Guicciardin and Clarendon would: 

Discedo Alceus puncto Illius; ille meo quis! 
Quis nisi Callimachus?

Apropos to writing histories and Guicciardin; I wish to God, Boccalini was living! never was such an opportunity for Apollo’s playing off a set of looks, as there is now!  The good city of London, who, from long dictating to the government, are now come to preside over taste and letters, have given one Carte,(954) a Jacobite parson, fifty pounds a-year, for seven years, to write the history of England; and four aldermen and six common councilmen are to .inspect his materials and the progress of the work.  Surveyors and common sewers turned supervisors of literature!  To be sure, they think a history of England is no more than Stowe’s Survey of the Parishes!  Instead of having books published with the imprimatur of an university, they Will be printed, as churches are whitewashed, John Smith and Thomas Johnson, churchwardens.

But, brother historian, you will wonder I should have nothing to communicate, when all Europe is bursting with events, and every day “big with the fate of Cato and of Rome.”  But so it is; I know nothing; Prince Charles’s great passage of the Rhine has hitherto produced nothing, more:  indeed, the French armies are moving towards him from Flanders; and they tell us, ours is crossing the Scheldt to attack the Count de Saxe, now that we arc equal to him, from our reinforcement and his diminutions.  In the mean time, as I am at least one of the principal heroes of my own politics, being secure of any invasion, I am going to leave all my lares, that is, all my antiquities, household gods and pagods, and take a journey into Siberia for six weeks, where my father’s grace of Courland has been for some time.

Lord Middlesex is going to be married to Miss Boyle,(955) Lady Shannon’s daughter; she has thirty thousand pounds, and may have as much more, if her mother, who is a plain widow, don’t happen to Nugentize.(956) The girl is low and ugly, but a vast scholar.