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This letter is part of the correspondence calendar of the complete correspondence of Thomas Gray. The calendar contains detailed bibliographic records for all known original, copied, or published letters written by or to the poet as well as the full-text, where available. Each record is accompanied by digitised images of the manuscript, where available, or digitised images of the first printed edition.
I have received the C: of O:, & return you my thanks for it. it engages our attention here, makes some of us cry a little, & all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights. we take it for a translation, & should believe it to be a true story, if it were not for St Nicholas.
When your pen was in your hand, you might have been a little more communicative: for, tho' disposed enough to believe the Opposition rather consumptive, I am entirely ignorant of all the symptoms. even what the Yorks have been doing for themselves, or attempting to do, is to me a secret. your canonical book I have been reading with great satisfaction. he speaketh as one having authority. if Englishmen have any feeling left, methinks they must feel now; & if the Ministry have any feeling (whom no body will suspect of insensibility) they must cut off the Author's ears, for it is in all the forms a most wicked libel. is the old Man, & the Lawyer put on, or is it real? or has some real Lawyer furnish'd a good part of the materials, & another Person employ'd them? this I guess, for there is an uncouthness of diction in the beginning, wch is not supported throughout, though it now & then occurs again, as if the Writer was weary of supporting the character he had assumed, when the subject had warmed him beyond dissimulation.
Rousseau's letters I am reading heavily, heavily! he justifies himself, till he convinces me, that
he deserved to be burnt, at least that his book did. I am not got thro' him, & you never will.
Voltaire I detest, & have not seen his book: I shall in good time. You surprise me, when you talk
of going in February: pray, does all the Minority go too? I hope, you have a reason. desperare de republicâ
is a deadly sin in politicks.