21 
over with me, and recommends me, above all things, 
first to make myself master of Latin, for which pur- 
pose he has recommended me a master, who taught 
all his children, who is to come for an hour every 
day: the usual terms are a guinea a month, but I 
am to give after the rate of eight guineas a year, 
and expect six or eight months will do. I hope you 
will not disapprove of this expense, as it is quite 
necessary, and you may depend on my frugality in 
every case where I can save money without missing 
anything of real importance. Dr. Hope thinks 
that, with the utmost ceconomy, I cannot spend 
less than 120/. a year; but I don’t see how it can 
amount to near that. 
“Tam quite pleased with my lodgings and compa- 
nions. My only fellow-lodger, besides Mr. Lubbock, 
is Mr. Engelhart, a most accomplished and agreeable 
young gentleman, whose father is physician to the 
King of Sweden. | 
«At Dr. Hope’s I have seen Lord Monboddo*: he 
is a plain-dressing elderly man; he had on an ordi- 
* The following notes concerning this nobleman’s works are 
extracted from Mr. Smith’s common-place book. 
“ Ancient Metaphysics, or the Science of Universals. J. Balfour, 
Edinburgh, 1783: 2 vols. 4to.—Lord Monboddo is the author of 
this very extraordinary work, and some other whimsical ones. It 
is amusing to see what great lengths the imaginations of some con- 
templative men will carry them in fanciful hypotheses, which the 
Abbé Buffier aptly calls philosophical romances. Indeed meta- 
physicians are a sort of knights errant in literature, who sally 
out in search of adventures in fancy’s region; and their wildness 
and absurdity, like that of the knights historians, are more or less 
shocking to reason and probability, as they are more or less inge- 
nious and penetrating ; but they are always absurd in something, 
