“The preceding day I lay at Liphook, and directed Mrs. Keen to send you this week a fine goose, and a brace of partridges....
“The road from Guildford quite to Portsmouth is really enchanting. But I wanted you to enjoy with me these glorious scenes of Nature. I hope, however, that the quiet of your present situation” (Miss Wilkes was visiting the Duchess de la Vallière) “has chased away your feveret, and restored you to sweet sleep, Nature’s best nurse. Pray send me such welcome news.”
And then this agitator and sometime blasphemous member of the Medmenham Hell-Fire Club goes on to write verses appreciative of the scenery on the Portsmouth Road. In this wise:—
“Ever charming, ever new,
The landscape never tires the view:
The verdant meads, the river’s flow,
The woody vallies warm and low;
The windy summit, wild and high,
Roughly rushing on the sky:
The pleasant seat, the ruin’d tower,
The naked rock, the shady bower;
The town and village,”——
But enough, enough. This “poetry” is but journalism cut into lengths and rhymed.
WILKES AS CRITIC
We find Wilkes as a poseur on literature in one of these entertaining letters to “dearest Polly.” He indites from his cottage of Sandham a June letter wherein he says how impatient he is for “the descending showers to call forth all Nature’s sweets, and waken all her flowers, for the earth is as thirsty as Boswell, and as cracked in many places as he certainly is in one. His book, however, is that of an entertaining madman. Poor Johnson! Does a friend come and add to the gross character of such a man the unknown trait of disgusting gluttony? I shall bring his two quartos back with me, and will point out numberless mistakes; but there are many excellent things in them. I suspect, not unfrequently, a mistake in the Dramatis Personæ. He has put down to Boswell what was undoubtedly said by Johnson; what the latter did, and what the former could not say. The motto to his book should have been the two lines of Pope,
‘Who tells whate’er you think, whate’er you say,
And if he lies not, must at least betray.’”
But he has a playful and somewhat engaging style of writing, on occasion. Perpend:—
“‘Anchor,’ at Liphook,
“Friday Afternoon, July 8, 1791.