M'Lean is condemned, and will hang. I am honourably mentioned in a Grub-street ballad for not having contributed to his sentence. There are as many prints and pamphlets about him as about the earthquake. His profession grows no joke: I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday night, the clock had not struck eleven, when I heard a loud cry of "Stop thief!" a highwayman had attacked a postchaise in Picadilly, within fifty yards of this house: the fellow was pursued, rode over the watchman, almost killed him, and escaped. I expect to be robbed some night in my own garden at Strawberry; I have a pond of gold fish, that to be sure they will steal to burn like old lace; and they may very easily, for the springs are so much sunk with this hot summer that I am forced to water my pond once a week! The season is still so fine, that I yesterday, in Kensington town, saw a horse-chestnut tree in second bloom.
As I am in town, and not within the circle of Pope's walks, I may tell you a story without fearing he should haunt me with the ghost of a satire. I went the other day to see little Spence,(188) who fondles an old mother in imitation of Pope. The good old woman was mighty civil to me, and, among other chat, said she supposed I had a good neighbour in Mr. Pope. "Lord! Madam, he has been dead these seven years!"—"Ah! ay, Sir, I had forgot." When the poor old soul dies, how Pope will set his mother's spectre upon her for daring to be ignorant "if Dennis be alive or dead!"(189)
(184) His collection was not sold till after his death, in the years 1754 and 1755.
(185) William Cooke.
(186) Dr. Secker. In November he was appointed to the said deanery.-E.
(187) There is the following entry in Evelyn's Diary for March 23, 1687-8: "Dr. Parker, Bishop of Oxford, who so lately published his extraordinary treatise about transubstantiation, and for abrogating the test and penal laws, died. He was esteemed a violent, passionate, haughty man; but yet being pressed to declare for the church of Rome, he utterly refused it. A remarkable end."-E.
(188) The Rev. Joseph Spence, author of an Essay on Pope's Odyssey, Polymetus, etc. See vol. i. pp. 27, 65. (He was always strongly attached to his mother. When on his travels, in 1739, he thus wrote to her:—"I am for happiness in my own way, and according to my notions of it, I might as well, and better, have it in living with you, at our cottage in Birchanger, than in any palace. As my affairs stand at present, 'tis likely that we shall have enough to live quite at our ease: when I desire more than that, may I lose what I have!"-E.)
(189) "I was not born for courts or great affairs;
I pay my debts, believe, and say my prayers;
Can sleep without a poem in my head,
Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead."
Pope, Prologue to Satires.-E.
83 Letter 31 To Sir Horace Mann. Arlington Street, Oct. 18, 1750.
I had determined so seriously to write to Dr. Cocchi a letter myself to thank him for his Baths of Pisa, that it was impossible not to break my resolution. It was to be in Italian, because I thought their superlative issimos would most easily express how much I like it, and I had already gathered a tolerable quantity together, of entertaining, charming, useful, agreeable, and had cut and turned them into the best sounding! Tuscan adjectives I could find in my memory or my Crusca: but, alack! when I came to range them, they did not fadge at all; they neither expressed what I would say, nor half what I would say, and so I gave it all up, and am reduced to beg you would say it all for me; and make as many excuses and as many thanks for me as you can, between your receiving this, and your next going to bully Richcourt, or whisper Count Lorenzi. I laughed vastly at your idea of the latter's hopping into matrimony; and I like as much Stainville's jumping into Richcourt's place. If your pedigree, which is on its journey, arrives before his fall, he will not dare to exclude YOU from the libro d'oro— -why, child, you will find yourself as sumptuously descended as