TO THE REV. WILLIAM UNWIN.
Olney, Nov. 1, 1784.
My dear Friend,—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 burden when you came out again. You did well to mention it at the T——s; they will now know that you do not pretend to 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 instance, it was only to give myself a greater, by eradicating from your mind any little weeds of suspicion that might still remain in it, that any man living is nearer to me than yourself. Had not this consideration 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 a man do I give to any man a precedence in my estimation at your expense.
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 old-fashioned 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 mottoes, 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."
Adieu,
W. C.