LETTER LXXVI.

To the Revd. WILLIAM UNWIN.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Nov. 1, 1784.

Were I to delay my answer,

I must yet write without a frank at last, and may as well therefore write without one now, especially feeling as I do, a desire to thank you for your friendly offices so well performed. I am glad for your sake, as well as for my own, that you succeeded in the first instance, and that the first trouble proved the last. I am willing too to consider Johnson's readiness to accept a second volume of mine, as an argument, that at least he was no loser by the former. I collect from it some reasonable hope, that the volume in question may not wrong him neither. My imagination tells me (for I know you interest yourself in the success of my productions) that your heart fluttered when you approached Johnson's door, and that it felt itself discharged of a burthen when you came out again. You did well to mention it at the T-s; they will now know, that you do not pretend a share in my confidence, whatever be the value of it, greater than you

actually possess. I wrote to Mr. Newton by the last post, to tell him that I was gone to the press again, He will be surprised, and perhaps not pleased. But I think he cannot complain, for he keeps his own authorly secrets without participating them with me. I do not think myself in the least injured by his reserve, neither should I if he were to publish a whole library without favouring me with any previous notice of his intentions. In these cases it is no violation of the laws of friendship not to communicate, though there must be a friendship where the communication is made. But many reasons may concur in disposing a writer to keep his work secret, and none of them injurious to his friends. The influence of one I have felt myself, for which none of them would blame me I mean the desire of surprising agreeably. And if I have denied myself this pleasure in your stance, it was only to give myself a greater, by eradicating from your mind any little weeds of suspicion, that might still remain in it, nearer to me than yourself.

in

that any man living is Had not this considera

tion forced up the lid of my strong box like a lever, it would have kept its contents with an invisible closeness to the last; and the first news, that either you or any of my friends would have heard of the

Task, they would have received from the public papers. But you know now, that neither as a poet nor as man, do I give to any man a precedence in my estimation at your expence.

I am proceeding with my new work (which at present I feel myself much inclined to call by the name of Tirocinium) as fast as the muse permits. It has reached the length of seven hundred lines, and will probably receive an addition of two or three hundred more. When you see Mr.

perhaps you will not find it difficult to procure from him half-a-dozen franks, addressed to yourself, and dated the fifteenth of December, in which case, they will all go to the post filled with my lucubrations, on the evening of that day. I do not name an earlier, because I hate to be hurried; and Johnson cannot want it sooner than, thus managed, it will reach him.

I am not sorry, that John Gilpin, though hitherto he has been nobody's child, is likely to be owned at last. Here and there I can give him a touch that I think will mend him, the language in some places not being quite so quaint and oldfashioned as it should be; and in one of the stanzas there is a false rhyme. When I have thus given the finishing stroke to his figure, I mean to grace him

with two mottos, a Greek and a Latin one, which, when the world shall see that I have only a little one of three words to the volume itself, and none to the books of which it consists, they will perhaps understand as a stricture upon that pompous display of literature, with which some authors take occasion to crowd their titles. Knox, in particular, who is a sensible man too, has not, I think, fewer than half a dozen to his Essays.

To condole with you on the

death of a Mother aged eighty-seven would be absurd rather, therefore, as is reasonable, I congratulate you on the almost singular felicity of having enjoyed the company of so amiable, and so near a relation so long. Your lot and mine in this respect

have been very different, as indeed in almost every other. Your Mother lived to see you rise, at least to see you comfortably established in the world. Mine dying when I was six years old, did not live to see me sink in it. You may remember with pleasure while you live, a blessing vouchsafed to you so long, and I, while I live, must regret a comfort, of which I was deprived so early. I can truly say that not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say a day) in which I do not think of her. Such was the impression her tenderness made upon me, though the opportunity she had for shewing it was so short. But ways of God are equal-and when I reflect on the pangs she would have suffered had she been a witness of all mine, I see more cause to rejoice, than to mourn, that she was hidden in the grave so soon.

the

We have as you say, lost a lively and sensible neighbour in Lady Austen, but we have been long accustomed to a state of retirement, within one degree of solitude, and being naturally lovers of still life, can relapse into our former duality without being unhappy at the change. To me indeed a third is not necessary, while I can have the companion I have had these twenty years.

I am gone to the press again; a volume of mine