which I may truly say have been to me invaluable.—I remain, dear sir, with the sincerest esteem, your ever obliged and obedient friend and servant.”
A month afterward, the same critic thanks his brother labourer for friendly emendations:—“You could not have given me a more sincere or a more pleasing proof of your kindness than the corrections and additions which you transmitted in your last favour; and of all which I shall be most anxious to avail myself. . . . .“Is there anything peculiar implied in the last part of the following passage? “It (Malkin’s Almahide and Hamet) is in my possession, and very much at your service; indeed, I would send it to you, but I am without a servant—
Most incident to what shall I say’—”
The Bishop of Dromore, Dr. French Laurence, Mr. Sayers, author of the Life of Mortimer (who writes through Mr. Amyot), Mr. Caldwell, and Dr. Mansell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and afterwards Bishop of Bristol, plied him variously with literary inquiries, or answers, as the case might be. To the latter he had complained of some accuser as to an alleged slip of the pen, and receives from that classical church dignitary a handsome testimony to the general merits of his style.[1]
- ↑ “Whether you wrote cingulus or cingulum, I really do not recollect. But this I do know, that if to be master at will of every classical image and sentiment—if to write simply, purely, and with the very properest words in their places—stamps the best acquaintance with all that is best and worthy in what is called classical, then I think you have very little occasion to trouble yourself about fifty or five hundred lapsus calami, of which no man is more guilty than myself, and unhappily without such sets-off. . . . . I congratulate you much upon the acquisition of the first edition of the Venus and Adonis, and agree with you that no one of this land could ever think of giving such a turn to their story.”
