e on one another, when
chance has brought them together. Of Mason, whom he fell in with at
York, he tells his brother, that "he is the most easy, best natured,
agreeable man he ever met with." In the next year, he met with
Goldsmith, and observed of him, "that of all solemn coxcombs, he was the
first, yet sensible; and that he affected to use Johnson's hard words in
conversation."

Soon after the first volume of his Essay on Pope had been published,
Lyttleton, then newly raised to the peerage, gave him his scarf, and
submitted some of his writings, before they were printed, to his
inspection.

Harris, the author of Hermes, and Lowth, were others in whose friendship
he might justly have prided himself.

He was one of the few that did not shrink from a collision with Johnson;
who could so ill endure a shock of this kind, that on one occasion he
cried out impatiently, "Sir, I am not used to contradiction."

"It would be better for yourself and your friends, Sir, if you were;"
was the natural retort. Their common friends interfered, to prevent a
ruder altercation.

Like Johnson, he delighted in London, where he regularly indulged
himself by passing the holidays at Christmas. His fondness for
everything relating to a military life was a propensity that he shared
with his brother; and while the one might have been seen following a
drum and fife at Oxford, the other, by the sprightliness of his
conversation, had drawn a circle of red coats about him at the St.
James's Coffee House, where he frequently breakfasted. Both of them were
members of the Literary Club, set on foot by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

This gaiety of temper did not hinder him from discharging his clerical
office in a becoming manner. "His style of preaching," we are told by
Mr. Wooll, "was unaffectedly earnest and impressive; and the dignified
solemnity with which he read the Liturgy, particularly the Communion
Service, was remarkably awful."

His reputation as a critic and a scholar has preserved his poetry from
neglect. Of his Odes, that to Fancy, written when he was very young, is
one that least disappoints us by a want of poetic feeling. Yet if we
compare it with that by Collins, on the Poetical Character, we shall see
of how much higher beauty the same subject was capable. In the Ode to
Evening, he has again tried his strength with Collins. There are some
images of rural life in it that have the appearance of being drawn from
nature, and which therefo