(634) on the night of the 17th, the Opera-house was entirely consumed by fire.-E.
(635) Thomas Batt, Esq. then one of the commissioners for public accounts.-E.
(636) The Rev. Norton Nicholls, rector of Lound and Bradwell in the county of Suffolk; one of the most elegant scholars and accomplished gentlemen of the day. He died in November 1809, in his sixty-eighth year. " It was his singular good fortune," says Mr. Dawson Turner, , to have been distinguished in his early life by the friendship of Gray the poet; while the close of his days was cheered and enlivened and dignified by the friendship, and almost constant society, of a Man scarcely inferior to Gray in talent and acquirements Mr. Mathias; who has embalmed his memory in an Italian Ode and a biographical Memoir; which latter is a beautiful specimen of that kind of composition.,, They will both be found in the fifth volume of Nicholls's Illustrations of Literature.-E.
Letter 330 To Miss Hannah More.
Strawberry Hill, June 23, 1789. (PAGE 418)
Madam Hannah, You are an errant reprobate, and grow wickeder and wickeder every day. You deserve to be treated like a negre; and your favourite Sunday, to which you are so partial that you treat the other poor six days of the week as if they had no souls to be saved, should, if I could have my will, "shine no Sabbath-day for you." Now, don't simper, and look as innocent as if virtue would not melt in your mouth. Can you deny the following charges?—I lent you "The Botanic Garden," and you returned it without writing a syllable, or saying, -where you were or whither you was going; I suppose for fear I should know how to direct to you. Why, if I did send a letter after you, could not you keep it three months without an answer, as you did last year?
In the next place, you and your nine accomplices, who, by the way, are too good in keeping you company, have clubbed the prettiest poem imaginable,(637) and communicated it to Mrs. Boscawen, with injunctions not to give a copy of it; I suppose, because you are ashamed of having written a panegyric. Whenever you do compose a satire, you are ready enough to publish it; at least, whenever you do, you will din one to death with it. But now, mind your perverseness: that very pretty novel poem, and I must own it is charming, have you gone and spoiled, flying in the faces of your best friends the Muses, and keeping no measures with them. I'll be shot if they dictated two of the best lines with two syllables too much in each—nay, you have weakened one of them,
"Ev'n Gardiner's mind"
is far more expressive than steadfast Gardiner's; and, as Mrs. Boscawen says, whoever knows any thing of Gardiner, could not want that superfluous epithet; and whoever does not, would not be the wiser for your foolish insertion—Mrs. Boscawen did not call it foolish, but I do. The second line, as Mesdemoiselles the Muses handed it to you, Miss, was,
"Have all be free and saved—"
not, "All be free and all be saved:" the second all be is a most unnecessary tautology. The poem was perfect and faultless, if you could have let it alone. I wonder how your mischievous flippancy could help maiming that most new and beautiful expression, "sponge Of sins;" I should not have been surprised, as you love verses too full of feet, if you have changed it to "that scrubbing-brush of sins."