Affectionately yours,
W. C.
TO SAMUEL ROSE, ESQ.
The Lodge, May 20, 1789.
My dear Sir,—Finding myself, between twelve and one, at the end of the seventeenth book of the Odyssey, I give the interval between the present moment and the time of walking, to you. If I write letters before I sit down to Homer, I feel my spirits too flat for poetry, and too flat for letter-writing if I address myself to Homer first; but the last I choose as the least evil, because my friends will pardon my dullness, but the public will not.
I had been some days uneasy on your account when yours arrived. We should have rejoiced to have seen you, would your engagements have permitted: but in the autumn, I hope, if not before, we shall have the pleasure to receive you. At what time we may expect Lady Hesketh, at present, I know not; but imagine that at any time after the month of June you will be sure to find her with us, which I mention, knowing that to meet you would add a relish to all the pleasures she can find at Weston.
When I wrote those lines on the Queen's visit, I thought I had performed well; but it belongs to me, as I have told you before, to dislike whatever I write when it has been written a month. The performance was therefore sinking in my esteem, when your approbation of it, arriving in good time, buoyed it up again. It will now keep possession of the place it holds in my good opinion, because it has been favoured with yours; and a copy will certainly be at your service whenever you choose to have one.
Nothing is more certain than that when I wrote the line,
God made the country, and man made the town,
I had not the least recollection of that very similar one, which you quote from Hawkins Brown. It convinces me that critics (and none more than Warton, in his notes on Milton's minor poems) have often charged authors with borrowing what they drew from their own fund. Brown was an entertaining companion when he had drunk his bottle, but not before: this proved a snare to him, and he would sometimes drink too much; but I know not that he was chargeable with any other irregularities. He had those among his intimates, who would not have been such, had he been otherwise viciously inclined; the Duncombs, in particular, father and son, who were of unblemished morals.