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life than in my service of Mr. Knapton on this occasion, and the preventing (which I hope I have done) his being torn in pieces. Yet you must not be surprised, I am sure I should not, if you hear (so great is the world's love of truth and of me) that my severity to him destroyed his credit, and would have pushed him to extremity. I will assure you you have heard many things of me full as true; which, though at present apocryphal, may, by my never contradicting them, in time become holy-writ, as the poet says.

God bless you, and believe me to be, &c.

LETTER IV.

MR. HURD TO DR. WARBURTON.

Cambridge, Dec. 1, 1755. I HAVE to tell you that it has pleased God to release my poor father from his great misery. You will guess the rest, when I acquaint you that his case was cancerous. All his family have great reason to be thankful for his deliverance: and yet I find myself not so well prepared for the stroke as I had thought. I blame myself now for having left him. Though when I was with him, as I could not hide my own uneasiness, I saw it only added to his. I know not what to say. He was the best of men in all relations, and had a generosity of mind that was amazing in his rank of life. In his long and great affliction he showed a temper which philosophers only talk of. If he

had any foible, it was, perhaps, his too great fondness for the unworthiest of his sons.-My mother is better than could be expected from her melancholy attendance. Yet her health has suffered by it. I have many letters to write, but would not omit communicating what so tenderly concerns me, to my best friend.

I thank you for your book and your kind letters. Mr. Balguy and I think much more hardly of Jortin than you do. I could say much of this matter at another time.

LETTER V.

DR. WARBURTON TO MR. HURD.

I OUGHT rather to rejoice with all who loved that good man lately released, than to condole with them. Can there be a greater consolation to all his friends than that he was snatched from human miseries to the reward of his labours? You I am sure must rejoice, amidst all the tenderness of filial piety and the softenings of natural affection; the gentle melancholy, that the incessant memory of so indulgent a parent and so excellent a man will make habitual, will be always brightened with the sense of his present happiness; where, perhaps, one of his pleasures is his ministering care over those which were dearest to him in life. I dare say this will be your case, because the same circumstances have made it mine. My great concern for you was while your father was languishing on his death-bed. And my concern at present

is for your mother's grief and ill state of health. True tenderness for your father, and the dread of adding to his distresses, absolutely required you to do what you did, and to retire from so melancholy

a scene.

As I know your excellent nature, I conjure you by our friendship to divert your mind by the conversation of your friends, and the amusement of trifling reading, till you have fortified it sufficiently to bear the reflection on this common calamity of our nature, without any other emotion than that occasioned by a kind of soothing melancholy, which perhaps keeps it in a better frame than any other kind of disposition.

You see what man is, when never so little within the verge of matter and motion in a ferment. The affair of Lisbon has made men tremble, as well as the continent shake, from one end of Europe to another, from Gibraltar to the Highlands of Scotland. To suppose these desolations the Scourge of heaven for human impieties, is a dreadful reflection; and yet to suppose ourselves in a forlorn and fatherless world, is ten times a more frightful consideration. In the first case, we may reasonably hope to avoid our destruction by the amendment of our manners; in the latter, we are kept incessantly alarmed by the blind rage of warring elements.

The relation of the captain of a vessel to the Admiralty, as Mr. Yorke told me the story, has something very striking in it. He lay off Lisbon on this fatal 1st of November, preparing to hoist sail for England. He looked towards the city in the morning, which gave the promise of a fine day,

and saw that proud metropolis rise above the waves, flourishing in wealth and plenty, and founded on a rock that promised a poet's eternity, at least, to its grandeur. He looked an hour after, and saw the city involved in flames, and sinking in thunder. A sight more awful mortal eyes could not behold on this side the day of doom. And yet does not human pride make us miscalculate? A drunken beggar shall work as horrid a desolation with a kick of his foot against an ant-hill, as subterraneous air and fermented minerals to a populous city. And if we take in the universe of things rather with a philosophic than a religious eye, where is the difference in point of real importance between them? A difference there is, and a very sensible one, in the merit of the two societies. The little Troglodytes amass neither superfluous nor imaginary wealth; and consequently have neither drones nor rogues amongst them. In the confusion, we see, caused by such a desolation, we find, by their immediate care to repair and remedy the general mischief, that none abandons himself to despair, and so stands not in need of bedlams and coroners' inquests: but, as the poet says,

"In this 'tis God directs; in that, 'tis man,"

And you will say, remember the sovereignty of reason. To this I reply, that the common defiuition of man is false: he is not a reasoning animal. The best you can predicate of him is, that he is an animal capable of reason, and this too we take upon old tradition. For it has not been my fortune yet to meet, I won't say with any one man, but I may safely swear with any one order of men, who ever did reason,

LETTER VI.

THE BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER TO MR. HURD.

Grosvenor-square, Jan. 6, 1761.

I AM here alone, and have been so this fortnight. But I have the satisfaction to tell you that all the family are well at Prior Park, which I have the pleasure to believe is more agreeable to you to know, than any thing I could tell you from the great world; that is, from this great congeries of vice and folly.

Sherlock was much more to blame for not letting his chaplain understand early that he was a blockhead by birth, than the chaplain for not giving his master the late intelligence that his parts were decayed by time; because the bishop, with all his infirmities of age, could see the one; but his chaplain, at his best, could never find out the other.

The Poem on the Death of a Lady I had communicated to me by lord Holderness. You may be sure I did not slip that opportunity of saying to the patron all that was fitting of the author and his poem. He considered what I said as flattering to himself, for he acquainted our friend that he had shown me the poem; as I understand by a letter I have received from Aston, pretty much to the same purpose with the account I had from you of that matter.

In asking after addresses*, you ask after those ephemera, or water-flies, whose existence, the na

*The Address of the Bishop and Clergy of the Diocese of Gloucester.-H.

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