'You think I should have used spei primæ, instead of spei alteræ. Spes is, indeed, often used to express something on which we have a future dependence, as in Virg. Eclog. i. l. 14,
"…. modo namque gemellos Spem gregis ah silice in nudá connixa reliquit."
and in Georg. iii. l. 473,
"Spemque gregemque simul,"
for the lambs and the sheep. Yet it is also used to express any thing on which we have a present dependence, and is well applied to a man of distinguished influence, our support, our refuge, our præsidium, as Horace calls Mæcenas. So, Ãneid xii. l. 57, Queen Amata addresses her son-in-law Turnus:—"Spes tu nunc una:" and he was then no future hope, for she adds,
"… decus imperiumque Latini Te penes;"
which might have been said of my Lord Bute some years ago. Now I consider the present Earl of Bute to be 'Excelsæ familiæ de Bute spes prima;' and my Lord Mountstuart, as his eldest son, to be 'spes altera.' So in Ãneid xii. l. 168, after having mentioned Pater Ãneas, who was the present spes, the reigning spes, as my German friends would say, the spes prima, the poet adds,
"Et juxta Ascanius, magnae spes altera Romæ."
'You think alteræ ungrammatical, and you tell me it should have been alteri. You must recollect, that in old times alter was declined regularly; and when the ancient fragments preserved in the Juris Civilis Fontes were written, it was certainly declined in the way that I use it. This, I should think, may protect a lawyer who writes alteræ in a dissertation upon part of his own science. But as I could hardly venture to quote fragments of old law to so classical a man as Mr. Johnson, I have not made an accurate search into these remains, to find examples of what I am able to produce in poetical composition. We find in Plaut. Rudens, act iii. scene 4,
"Nam Jiuic alters patria qua: sit profecto nescio."