My omission of Lord Halifax’s maxims was a very careless one, and has been rectified.  I did examine the Musae Anglicaanae, and I think found a copy or two, and at first fancied I had found more, till I came to examine narrowly.  In the Joys and Griefs of Oxford and Cambridge, are certainly many noble copies; but you judge very right, Sir—­they are not to be mentioned, no more than exercises at school, where, somehow or other, every peer has been a poet.  To my shame, you are still more in the right about the Duke of Buckingham:  if you will give me leave, instead of thinking that he Wrote, hoping to be mistaken for his predecessor, I will believe that he hoped so after he had written.

You are again in the right, Sir, about Lord Abercorn, as the present lord himself informed me.  I don’t know Lord Godolphin’s verses:  at most, by your account, he should be in the Appendix; but if they are only signed Sidney Godolphin, they may belong to his uncle, who, if I remember rightly, was one of the troop of verse-writers of that time.

You have quite persuaded me of the mistake in Mindas; till you mentioned it, I had forgot that they wrote Windsor “Windesore,” and then by abbreviation the mistake was easy.

The account of Lord Clarendon is printed off; I do mention as printed his account of Ireland, though I knew nothing of Borlase.  Apropos, Sir, are you not glad to see that the second part of his history is actually advertised to come out soon after Christmas?(962)

Lord Nottingham’s letter I shall certainly mention.

I yesterday sent to Mr. Whiston a little piece that I have just mentioned here, and desired him to convey it to you; you must not expect a great deal from it:  yet it belongs so much to my Catalogue, that I thought it a duty to publish it.  A better return to some of your civilities is to inform you of Dr. Jortin’s Life of Erasmus, with which I am much entertained.  There are numberless anecdotes of men thought great in their day, now as much forgotten, that it grows valuable again to hear about them.  The book is written with great moderation and goodness of heart:  the style is not very striking, and has some vulgarisms, and In a work of that bulk I should rather have taken more pains to digest and connect it into a flowing narrative, than drily give it as a diary:  yet I dare promise it will amuse you much.

With your curiosity, Sir, and love of information, I am sure you will be glad to hear of a most valuable treasure that I have discovered; it is the collection of state papers,(963) amassed by the two Lords Conway, that were secretaries of state, and their family:  vast numbers have been destroyed; yet I came time enough to retrieve vast numbers, many, indeed, in a deplorable condition.  They were buried under lumber’ upon the pavement of an unfinished chapel, at Lord Hertford’s in Warwickshire, and during his minority, and the absence of his father, an ignorant