do not recollect ever to have employed my pen on any topick more interesting than that which I mean to make the subject of this letter. In mentioning your long-continued kindness to me, I trust I shall not be charged with any idle vanity; a weakness, if I at all know myself, most foreign from my nature and disposition. If the desire laudari a laudato viro be natural and excusable, I surely may be allowed to feel some degree of pride in the consciousness of having so long enjoyed the friendship of him, whom all who know him personally love and esteem, and whose virtues and attainments are admired and venerated wherever the name of Englishman is known.
It has been said, and I believe truly, that every individual of this country, whose mind has been at all cultivated, feels a pride in being able to boast of our great dramatick poet, Shakspeare, as his countryman: and proportionate to our respect and veneration for that extraordinary man ought to be our care of his fame, and of those valuable writings that he has left us; and our solicitude to preserve them pure and unpolluted by any modern sophistication or foreign admixture
