or misguided by it.”  Well, Dr. Cocchi, do English divines yield to the Romish for refinements in absurdity! did one ever hear of a better way (if making sense of any writing than by reading it without stops!  Most of the parsons that read the first and second lessons practise Mr. Cooke’s method of making them intelligible, for they seldom observe any stops.  George Selwyn proposes to send the man his own sermon, and desire him to scratch out the stops, in order to help it to some sense.

For the questions in Florentine politics, and who are to be your governors, I am totally ignorant, you must ask Sir Charles Williams; he is the present ruling star of our negotiations.  His letters are as much admired as ever his verses were.  He has met the ministers of the two angry empresses, and pacified Russian savageness and Austrian haughtiness.  He is to teach the monarch of Prussia to fetch and carry, .@;, unless they happen to treat in iambics, or begin to settle the limits of’ Parnassus instead of’ those of Silesia.  As he is so good a pacifier, I don’t know but we may want his assistance at home before the end of the winter: 

“With secretaries, secretaries jar,
And rival bureaus threat approaching war.”

Those that deal in elections look still higher, and snuff a new Parliament; but I don’t believe the King ill, for the Prince is building baby-houses at Kew; and the Bishop of Oxford has laid aside his views on Canterbury, and is come roundly back to St. James’s for the deanery of St. Paul’s.(186) I could not help being diverted the other day with the life of another Bishop of Oxford, one Parker, who, like Secker, set out a Presbyterian, and died King James the Second’s arbitrary master of Maudlin College.(187)

M’Lean is condemned, and will hang.  I am honourably mentioned in a Grub-street ballad for not having contributed to his sentence.  There are as many prints and pamphlets about him as about the earthquake.  His profession grows no joke:  I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday night, the clock had not struck eleven, when I heard a loud cry of “Stop thief!” a highwayman had attacked a postchaise in Picadilly, within fifty yards of this house:  the fellow was pursued, rode over the watchman, almost killed him, and escaped.  I expect to be robbed some night in my own garden at Strawberry; I have a pond of gold fish, that to be sure they will steal to burn like old lace; and they may very easily, for the springs are so much sunk with this hot summer that I am forced to water my pond once a week!  The season is still so fine, that I yesterday, in Kensington town, saw a horse-chestnut tree in second bloom.

As I am in town, and not within the circle of Pope’s walks, I may tell you a story without fearing he should haunt me with the ghost of a satire.  I went the other day to see little Spence,(188) who fondles an old mother in imitation of Pope.  The good old woman was mighty civil to me, and, among other chat, said she supposed I had a good neighbour in Mr. Pope.  “Lord!  Madam, he has been dead these seven years!”—­“Ah! ay, Sir, I had forgot.”  When the poor old soul dies, how Pope will set his mother’s spectre upon her for daring to be ignorant “if Dennis be alive or dead!"(189)