TO SAMUEL ROSE, ESQ.
Weston, Aug. 22, 1793.
My dear Friend,—I rejoice that you have had so pleasant an excursion, and have beheld so many beautiful scenes. Except the delightful Upway, I have seen them all. I have lived much at Southampton, have slept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the bay of Weymouth. It will give us great pleasure to see you here, should your business give you an opportunity to finish your excursions of this season with one to Weston.
As for my going on, it is much as usual. I rise at six; an industrious and wholesome practice from which I have never swerved since March. I breakfast generally about eleven—have given the intermediate time to my old delightful bard. Villoisson no longer keeps me company, I therefore now jog along with Clarke and Barnes at my elbow, and from the excellent annotations of the former, select such as I think likely to be useful, or that recommend themselves by the amusement they may afford; of which sorts there are not a few. Barnes also affords me some of both kinds, but not so many, his notes being chiefly paraphrastical or grammatical. My only fear is, lest between them both I should make my work too voluminous.
W. C.
TO WILLIAM HAYLEY, ESQ.
Weston, Aug. 27, 1793.
I thank you, my dear brother, for consulting the Gibbonian oracle on the question concerning Homer's muse and his blindness. I proposed it likewise to my little neighbour Buchanan, who gave me precisely the same answer. I felt an insatiable thirst to learn something new concerning him, and, despairing of information from others, was willing to hope, that I had stumbled on matter unnoticed by the commentators, and might, perhaps, acquire a little intelligence from himself. But the great and the little oracle together have extinguished that hope, and I despair now of making any curious discoveries about him.
Since Flaxman (which I did not know till your letter told me so) has been at work for the Iliad, as well as the Odyssey, it seems a great pity, that the engravings should not be bound up with some Homer or other; and, as I said before, I should have been too proud to have bound them up in mine. But there is an objection, at least such it seems to me, that threatens to disqualify them for such a use, namely, the shape and size of them, which are such, that no book of the usual form could possibly receive them, save in a folded state, which, I apprehend, would be to murder them.