to say Scotland.  I have discovered another very agreeable writer among your countrymen, and in a profession where I did not look for an author; It is Mr. Ramsay,(1011) the painter, whose pieces being anonymous have been overlooked.  He has a great deal of genuine wit, and a very just manner of reasoning.  In his own walk he has great merit.  He and Mr. Reynolds are our favourite painters, and two of the very best we ever had.  Indeed, the number of good has been very small, considering the numbers there are.  A very few years ago there were computed two thousand portrait painters in London; I do not exaggerate the computation, but diminish; though I think it must have been exaggerated.  Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Ramsay can scarce be rivals; their manners are so different.  The former is bold, and has a kind of tempestuous colouring, yet with dignity and grace; the latter is all delicacy.  Mr. Reynolds seldom succeeds in women; Mr. Ramsay is formed to paint them.

I fear I neglected, Sir, to thank you for your present of the history of the conspiracy of the Gowries:  but I shall never forget all the obligations I have to you.  I don’t doubt but in Scotland you approve what is liked here almost as much as Mr. Robertson’s history; I mean the marriage of Colonel Campbell and the Duchess of Hamilton.  If her fortune is singular, so is her merit.  Such uncommon noise as her beauty made has not at all impaired the modesty of her behaviour.  Adieu!

(1009) Now first collected.

(1010) Dr. Robertson’s “History of Scotland during the Reigns of Mary and James the Sixth,” was published in the beginning of this month.-E.

(1011) Alan Ramsay, the eminent portrait-painter, and eldest son of the poet; on whose death, in 1757, in somewhat embarrassed circumstances, he paid his debts.  He was an excellent classical scholar, understood French and Italian, and had all the polish and liberal feeling of a highly instructed man.  In Bouquet’s pamphlet on “The Present State of the Fine Arts in England,” published in 1755, he is described as “an able painter, who, acknowledging no other guide than nature, brought a rational taste of resemblance with him from Italy.”  He died in 1784.-E.

480 Letter 307 To Sir Horace Mann.  Strawberry Hill, March 1, 1759.

I know you are ministerial enough, or patriot enough, (two words that it is as much the fashion to couple now as it was formerly to part them,) to rejoice over the least bit of a conquest, and therefore I hurry to send you a morsel of Martinico, which you may lay under your head, and dream of having taken the whole island.  As dreams often go by contraries, you must not be surprised if you wake and find we have been beaten back; but at this present moment, we are all dreaming of victory.  A frigate has been taken going to France with an account that our troops landed on the island on the 16th of January, without opposition.  A seventy-gun ship was dismissed