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96 answer to your last kind letter. Indeed, I would not wish you to be entirely satisfied, and I cannot desire you should bear any apparent neglect on my part without some degree of displeasure; yet when you reflect on the busy scene in which I have been a principal actor, or the various occupations, civil and military, which have occupied my mind and body, you will, I doubt not, pardon and perhaps pity me, whose whole time has been taken up in occupations different from those you know to be my favourite amusements; more especially when you consider that I have been thus obliged to interrupt a constant correspondence which has ever been one of my most pleasing occupations. But my comfort is, that I have been doing my duty. From that I trust no fatigue either of mind or of body shall ever be able to deter me. I have now, however, a moment of leisure, indeed but a moment; and that I give to you and to our own pleasing subjects of literary intercourse.

Since I last wrote, I have had time only to peruse two books, idle ones indeed, and that by snatches: Warton’s Pope, and Bryant’s Rowley. The former is, I think, the most extraordinary work I ever read, and is indeed everything but what it promises. The writer seems to have copied, and impudently enough printed, his commonplace book of anecdotes and remarks upon various writers. Some parts are indeed critical, but his criticisms are not in my opinion always just, and there is but little anywhere to be found that can be called new.

As to Bryant, he ought, I think, to be answered by some of your Chattertonians, or Rowley may still have some chance with posterity, though the laugh be now against him. The arguments of his defenders are sometimes weak, but in many instances, if not answered critically, and not merrily, are strong enough to support a claim at least to some part of what is attributed to him. Indeed the whole controversy appears to me in some respects like that of Boyle and Bentley respecting the Epistles of Phalaris. All the wit and genius are on one side, together with some good argument, but the weight of proof seems to be on the other. In the case of Phalaris, wit supported the supposed imposture, which in the