If the time is come for Mr. Pitt to want you, you will not long be unemployed; if it is not, then you would get nothing by asking.  Consider, too, how much more graceful a reparation of your honour it will be, to have them forced to recall you, than to force yourself on desperate service, as if you yourself, not they, had injured your reputation.

I can say nothing now on any other chapter, this has so much engrossed all my thoughts.  I see no one reason upon earth for your asking now.  If you ever should ask again, you will not want opportunities; and the next time you ask, will have just the same merit that this could have, and by asking in time, would be liable to none of the objections of that sort which I have mentioned!  Adieu!  Timeo Lord George et dona.

(970) Now first printed.

(971) To the command of an expedition against Martinique.-E.

(972) Mr. Fox.

(973) Lord Bute says, in a letter to Mr. Pitt, of the 8th of September, “With regard to Clarke, I know him well:  he must be joined to a general in whom he has confidence, or not thought of.  Never was man so cut out for bold and hardy enterprises; but the person who commands him must think in the same way of him, or the affair of Rochfort will return.”  Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 350.-E.

459 Letter 290 To The Rev. Henry Zouch.  Strawberry Hill, Oct. 21st, 1758.

Sir, Every letter I receive from you is a new obligation, bringing me new information; but, sure, my Catalogue was not worthy of giving you so much trouble.  Lord Fortescue is quite new to me:  I have sent him to the press.  Lord Dorset’s poem it will be unnecessary to mention separately, as I have already said that his works are to be found among those of the minor poets.

I don’t wonder, Sir, that you prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius; nor can two authors well be more unlike:  the former(974) wrote a general history in a most obscure and almost unintelligible style; the latter-, a portion of private history, in the noblest style in the world.  Whoever made the comparison, I will do them the justice to believe that they understood bad Greek better than their own language in its elevation.

For Dr. Jortin’s Erasmus, which I have very nearly finished, it has given me a good opinion of the author, and he has given me a very bad one of his subject.  By the Doctor’s labour and impartiality, Erasmus appears a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover truth, and not courage enough to profess it:  whose vanity made him always writing; yet Ills writings ought to have cured his vanity, as they were the most abject things in the world.  Good Erasmus’s honest mean was alternate time-serving.  I never had thought much about him, and now heartily despise him.