Well, Harry, Scotland is the last place on earth I should have thought of for turning any body poet:  but I begin to forgive it half its treasons in favour of your verses, for I suppose you don’t think I am the dupe of the highland story that you tell me:  the only use I shall make of it is to commend the lines to you, as if they really were a Scotchman’s.  There is a melancholy harmony in them that is charming, and a delicacy in the thoughts that no Scotchman is capable of, though a Scotchwoman(1302 might inspire it.  I beg, both for Cynthia’s sake and my own, that you would continue your De Tristibus till I have an opportunity of seeing your muse, and she of rewarding her:  Reprens ta musette, berger amoureux!  If Cynthia has ever travelled ten miles in fairy-land, she must be wondrous content with the person and qualifications of her knight, who in future story will be read of thus:  Elmedorus was tall and perfectly well made, his face oval, and features regularly handsome, but not effeminate; his complexion sentimentally brown, with not much colour; his teeth fine, and forehead agreeably low, round which his black hair curled naturally and beautifully.  His eyes were black too, but had nothing of fierce or insolent; on the contrary, a certain melancholy swimmingness, that described hopeless love rather than a natural amorous languish.  His exploits in war, where he always fought by the side of the renowned Paladine William of England, have endeared his memory to all admirers of true chivalry, as the mournful elegies which he poured out among the desert rocks of Caledonia,(1303) in honour of the peerless lady and his heart’s idol, the incomparable Cynthia, will for ever preserve his name in the flowery annals of poesy.

What a pity it is I was not born in the golden age of Louis the Fourteenth, when it was not only the fashion to write folios, but to read them too! or rather , it is a pity the same fashion don’t subsist NOW, when one need not be at the trouble of invention, nor of turning the whole Roman history into romance for want of proper heroes.  Your campaign in Scotland, rolled out and well be-epitheted, would make a pompous work, and make one’s fortune; at sixpence a number, one should have all the damsels within the liberties for subscribers:  whereas now, if one has a mind to be read, one must write metaphysical poems in blank verse, which, though I own to be still easier, have not half the imagination of romances, and are dull without any agreeable absurdity.  Only think of the gravity of this wise age, that have exploded “Cleopatra and Pharamond,” and approve “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” “The Art of Preserving Health,” and “Leonidas!” I beg the age’s pardon:  it has done approving these poems, and has forgot them.

Adieu! dear Harry.  Thank you seriously for the poem.  I am going to town for the birthday, and shall return hither till the Parliament meets; I suppose there is no doubt of our meeting then.  Yours ever.