a former occasion.—(This and the former from Mr. Gerard Hamilton.)
Petrarch observes in one of his letters (Epist. Fam. l. ii. ep. 2) that the Romans before the time of Sylla were buried entire in the earth, and that the practice of cremation began with the dictator, who apprehending that some of the Marian faction would treat his own remains as ill as he had done those of Marius, ordered his dead body to be burned.
Dr. Arthur Charlette in the last age corresponded with almost all the celebrated persons of that time, and preserved all their letters. An immense collection of them, which he had made and bound in several folio volumes, fell into the hands of Mr. Ballard, author of the Memoirs of Learned Ladies of Great Britain, and are now in the Bodleian Library. They contain, as Mr. Warton informs me, many curious anecdotes.
August 6, 1791.—I dined at Sir William Scott’s in the Commons, with Mr. Windham, Mr. Erskine, Sir William Wynne, Sir J. Reynolds, and a Mr. De Vyme. The latter, who was the son of a French refugee, and spoke English perfectly well, had lived in Portugal for forty years, and was at Lisbon at the time of the earthquake; of which he gave us a curious account.
It happened about ten in the morning on All Souls’ Day, when many of the people were in the
