Mr. Lort has delivered your papers to me, dear Sir, and I have already gone through them.  I will try if I can make any thing of them, but I fear I have not art enough, as I perceive there is absolutely but one fact—­the expulsion.  You have certainly very clearly proved that Mr. Baker was neither supported by Mr. Prior nor Bishop Burnet; but these are mere negatives.  So is the question, whether he intended to compile an Athenae Cantabrigienses or not; and on that you say but little, as you have not seen his papers in the Museum.  I will examine the printed Catalogue, and try if I can discover the truth thence, when I go to town.  I will also borrow the new Biographia, as I wish to know more of the expulsion.  As it is our only fact, one would not be too dry on it.  Upon the whole, I think that it would be preferable to draw up an ample character of Mr. Baker, rather than a life.  The one was most beautiful, amiable, conscientious; the other totally barren of more than one event:  and though you have taken excellent pains to discover all that was possible, yet there is an obscurity hangs over the circumstances that even did attend him; as his connexion with Bishop Crewe and his living.  His own modesty comes out the brighter, but then it composes a character, not a life.

As to Mr. Kippis and his censures, I am perfectly indifferent to them.  He betrays a pert malignity in hinting an intention of being severe on my father, for the pleasure of exerting a right I allowed, and do allow, to be a just One, though it is not just to do it for that reason; however, let him say his pleasure.  The truth will not hurt my father; falsehood will recoil on the author.  His asserting, that my censure of Mr. Addison’s character of Lord Somers is not to be justified, is a silly ipse dixit, as he does not, in truth cannot, show why it is not to be justified.  The passage I alluded to is the argument of an old woman; and Mr. Addison’s being a writer of true humour is not justification of his reasoning like a superstitious gossip.  In the other passage you have sent me, Mr. Kippis is perfectly in the right, and corrects me very justly.  Had I seen Archbishop Abbot’s(313) Preface, with the outrageous flattery on, And lies of James I., I should certainly never have said, “Honest Abbot could not flatter!” I should have said, and do say, I never saw grosser perversion of truth.  One can almost excuse the faults of James when his bishops were such base sycophants.  What can a king think of human nature, when it produces such wretches?  I am too impartial to prefer Puritans to clergymen, or vice versa, when Whitgift and Abbot only ran a race of servility and adulation:  the result is, that priests of all religions are the same.  James and his Levites were worthy of each other; the golden calf and the idolaters were well coupled, and it is Pity they ever came out of the wilderness.  I am very glad Mr. Tyson has escaped death and disappointment: