On a fresh scare being caused by the illness of her maid, which the old women of the parish pronounced to be smallpox, Mrs. Robinson sent Elizabeth and Sarah to the cottage of the carpenter hard by without delay, though so late that Elizabeth writes—
“I arrived at my new lodging but the moment before it was time to go to bed, where I slept pretty well, notwithstanding the goodman and his wife snored, the little child cryed, the maid screamed, one little boy had whooping cough, another roared with chilblains. The furniture of our chamber is extraordinary, the ornamental parts as follows:—on the mantelpiece four stone tea-cups, four wineglasses, two broken, two leaden cherubims, a piece of looking-glass, with a ‘beggerly account of empty bottles,’ as Shakespeare calls it, a print of King Charles the Martyr, the woeful ballad of the children in the wood, a pious copy of verses entitled ‘the believer’s gold chain, or good councell for all men,’ with a resplendent brass warming pan, in which my sister is dressing her head to the disadvantage of her complexion, and not much to the rectitude of her head-dress.”
The alarm proved to be false as to the nature of the maid’s illness, and they returned the next day to the paternal mansion.
EDMUND CURLL
On November 12 Elizabeth writes from Bath to her sister a long and indignant letter upon some poems brought out in the name of Prior. She says—
“I got at last this morning the poems just published under Prior’s[60] name, brought them home under my arm, locked my door, sat me down by my fireside, and opened the book with great expectation, but to my disappointment found it to be the most wretched trumpery that you can conceive, the production of the meanest of Curl’s[61] band of scribblers.”
[60] Matthew Prior, born 1664, died 1721.
[61] Edmund Curll, born 1675, died 1747; publisher, etc., ridiculed by Pope in the “Dunciad.”
She continues to inveigh against this forgery in eloquent terms, and towards the end of the letter remarks “that mankind can’t support above two dead languages at a time, so as to have any tolerable knowledge or use of them, therefore in all probability Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Prior, and Pope are but short-lived, in comparison of those Methuselahs the Classicks.”
BATH —
GRACE FREIND