CORRESPONDENCE WITH HIS FAMILY. 181 



family have had colds, coughs, &c., but are now nearly well ; 

 as to myself, I have escaped, like John Woods 's old horses, by 

 old age and other infirmities. Thank you for the elegant 

 quotation from Middleton*. Is not the ridicule some of our 

 wise governors would have thrown on America applicable to 

 Cicero's on Britain ? and may not America be to England ere 

 long what England is now to Rome? I cannot allow that the 

 Bomans acquired their riches by virtuous industry ; the infa- 

 mous oppression these people exercised over mankind has been 

 handled too tenderly. 



Hlinc is pure Saxon, a bank cast up for boundary ; hence 

 our " linch " and " linchot " between fields. As you seem to 

 allow me to frolick in conjecture (as Johnson says), I will 

 examine the fields. 



Molly goes to-morrow with Dr. Thomas to Cambridge ; she 

 has had no return of her complaint, and is to use the cold 

 bath there. I want you to read Plot's treatise ' De origine 

 Fontium/ in which he states what has been advanced on all 



* [The following is undoubtedly the passage sent by Gilbert White to 

 his brother, referred to in this letter. The intensity of Middleton's an- 

 tipathy to modern Rome and Romanism is manifested in more than one 

 of his works. The * Life of Cicero/ from which the present passage is 

 taken, had appeared in 1741. It was published by subscription ; and there 

 were no less than six thousand subscribers to the first edition. 



After quoting from letters to Atticus, to Cicero's brother Quintus, to 

 Trebalius, &c., Middleton proceeds in the following strain. 



" From their railleries on the barbarity and misery of our island, one 

 cannot help reflecting on the surprising fate and revolutions of kingdoms : 

 how Rome, once the mistress of the world, the seat of arts, empire, and 

 glory, now lies sunk in sloth, ignorance, and poverty, enslaved to the 

 most cruel as well as the most contemptible of tyrants, superstition and 

 religious imposture ; while this remote country, anciently the jest and 

 contempt of the polite Romans, is become the happy seat of liberty, 

 plenty, and letters, flourishing in all the arts and refinements of civil 

 j^fe yet running perhaps the same course which Rome itself had run be- 

 fore it, from virtuous industry to wealth, from wealth to luxury, from 

 luxury to an impatience of discipline and corruption of morals, till, by a 

 total degeneracy and loss of virtue, being grown ripe for destruction, it 

 falls a prey at last to some hardy oppressor, and, with the loss of liberty 

 losing every thing else that is valuable, sinks gradually again into its ori- 

 ginal barbarism." T. B.] 



