LETTERS. 2G5 



TO MR JOHN CHARLESWORTH. 



XottiDghamj 6th July 1805, 

 Dear Charli:swoeth, 



* * '* * 



T beg you will admire the elegance of texture and 

 shape of the sheet on which I have the honour to write 

 to you, and beware, lest in drawing your conclusions, 

 you conceive that I am turned exciseman ; for I assure 

 you I write altogether in character ; — a poor Cambridge 

 scholar, with a patrimony of a few old books, an ink-horn, 

 and some sundry quires of paper, manufactured as the 

 envelope of pounds of tea, but converted into repositories 

 of learning and taste. 



The classics are certainly in disrepute. The ladies 

 have no more reverence for Greek and Latin than they 

 have for an old peruke, or the ruffles of Queen Anne. I 

 verily believe that they would hear Homer's Greek with- 

 out evidencing one mark of terror and awe, even though 

 spouted by a University orator, or a Westminster stentor. 



tempera, mores ! the rural elegance of the twanging 

 French horn, and the vile squeak of the Italian fiddle^ 

 are more preferred than all the energy and all the subli- 

 mity of all the Greek and Roman orators, historians, 

 poets, and philosophers, put together. Now, sir, as a 

 classic, I cannot bear to have the honourable fame of the 

 ancients thus despised and contemned, and therefore I 

 have a controversy with all the beaux and belles. French- 

 men and Italians. When they tell me that I walk by 

 rule and compass, that I balance my body with strict re- 

 gard to the centre of gravity, and that I have more Greek 

 in my pate than grace in my limbs, I can bear it all in 

 sullen silence ; for you know it must be a libel, since I 

 am no mathematician, and therefore cannot have learned 

 to walk ill by system. As for grace, I do believe, since 



1 read Xenophon, I am become a very elegant man, and 

 in due time shall be able to spout Pindar, dancing in 

 due gradation the advancing, retrograde, and medium 



