Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/80

 60 other friends and that he had to act as interpreter. Guest and host agreed admirably in their principles and prejudices and the doctor " who was a great gourmet " was delighted with the Burgundy which was set before him but alas ! he was summoned back to the embassy before the repast was over. For " three long English miles " did Warner and Neville trudge back through the pouring rain, but " nothing could damp the Chaplain's ardour " while he expatiated on his new friend's " easy manners, refined ideas, and above all his politics." Neville dwells on the doctor's subsequent detention at Boulogne for eighteen months and declares that he recanted his opinions. But this too cannot be accepted without great reserve. It was during this enforced sojourn in France that Warner sent to the Gentleman's Magazine the two lively letters of portentous length, which open its volume for the first half of 1792. He advocated a subscrip- tion for the best English imitation of Juvenal's eighth satire, and hoped that England and France would unite their efforts to bless the world by the arts of peace. His conclusion was a poem " When Reason now at heaven's command," a parody of Thomson's Britannia. Some years before this time Warner fell under the lash of that once-famous satirist, Mathias. In one of his frank moments he spoke of the anonymous author of the " Heroic epistle [in verse] to Dr. Watson " as a vile poetaster and imitator of his friend Macgreggor, the pseudonym of the rev. William Mason, the poet and friend of Gray. This reached the ears of the virulent Mathias who thereupon in his " Heroic address in prose " to the same Doctor spoke of the depreciator of his poetic merits as " commonly known by the name of J k W r, a d — mn'd clever fellow at college. The suspicion however has now subsided. He affects to give himself airs because George Augustus Selwyn . . . chose him for his companion in a tour to