I am just undertaking an edition of Lucan, my friend Mr. Bentley having in his possession his father’s notes and emendations on the first seven books.  Perhaps a partiality for the original author concurs a little. with this circumstance of the notes, to make me fond of printing, at Strawberry Hill, the works of a man who, alone of all the classics, was thought to breathe too brave and honest a spirit for the perusal of the Dauphin and the French.  I don’t think that a good or bad taste in poetry is of so serious a nature, that I should be afraid of owning too, that, with that great judge Corneille, and with that, perhaps, no judge Heinsius, I prefer Lucan to Virgil.  To speak fairly, I prefer great sense to poetry with little sense.  There are hemistics in Lucan that go to one’s soul and one’s heart;—­for a mere epic poem, a fabulous tissue of uninteresting battles that don’t teach one even to fight, I know nothing more tedious.  The poetic images, the versification and language of the Aeneid are delightful; but take the story by itself, and can any thing be more silly and unaffeCting?  There are a few gods without power, heroes without character, heaven-directed wars without justice, inventions without probability, and a hero who betrays one woman with a kingdom that he might have had, to force himself upon another woman and another kingdom to which he had no pretensions, and all this to show his obedience to the gods!  In short, I have always admired his numbers so much, and his meaning so little, that I think I should like Virgil better if I understood him less.

Have you seen, Sir, a book which has made some noise—­Helvetius de l’Esprit?  The author is so good and moral a man, that I grieve he should have published a system of as relaxed morality as can well be imagined.-. ’tis a large quarto, and in general a very superficial one.  His philosophy may be new in France, but is greatly exhausted here.  He tries to imitate Montesquieu, and has heaped commonplaces upon commonplaces, which supply or overwhelm his reasoning; yet he has often wit, happy allusion;, and sometimes writes finely:  there is merit enough to give an obscure man fame; flimsiness enough to depreciate a great man.  After his book was licensed, they forced him to retract it by a most abject recantation.  Then why print this book?  If zeal for his system pushed him to propagate it, did not he consider that a recantation would hurt his cause more than his arguments could support it.

We are promised Lord Clarendon in February from Oxford, though I hear shall have the surreptitious edition from Holland much sooner.

You see, Sir, I am a sceptic as well as Helvetius, but of a more moderate complexion.  There is no harm in telling mankind that there is not so much divinity in the Aeneid as they imagine; but, (Even if I thought so,) I would not preach that virtue and friendship are mere names, and resolvable into self-interest; because there are numbers that would remember the grounds of the principle, and forget what was to be engrafted on it.  Adieu!