I am
sensible they are better than I could compose now. I am aware of the
decay of the middling parts I had, and others may be still more sensible
of it. How do I know but I am superannuated? nobody will be so coarse as
to tell me so; but if I published dotage, all the world would tell me
so. And who but runs that risk who is an author after seventy? What
happened to the greatest author of this age, and who certainly retained
a very considerable portion of his abilities for ten years after my
age?[1] Voltaire, at eighty-four, I think, went to Paris to receive the
incense, in person, of his countrymen, and to be witness of their
admiration of a tragedy he had written, at that Methusalem age. Incense
he did receive till it choked him; and, at the exhibition of his play,
he was actually crowned with laurel in the box where he sat. But what
became of his poor play? It died as soon as he did--was buried with him;
and no mortal, I dare to say, has ever read a line of it since, it was
so bad.

[Footnote 1: Voltaire had for several years been in disgrace at Court,
and had been living in Switzerland; but in 1778 he returned to Paris to
superintend the performance of a new tragedy, "Irene." He was, however,
greatly mortified at the refusal of Marie Antoinette to allow him to be
presented to her, and was but partly comforted by the enthusiasm of the
audience at the theatre, who crowned him on the stage after the
performance. Mme. du Deffand, who, in a letter to Walpole a few days
before, had said that if the tragedy did not succeed it would kill him,
says in a subsequent letter that its success had been very
moderate--that the enthusiasm of the audience had been for Voltaire
himself; and at all events her prophecy was fulfilled, for he died a few
weeks afterwards.]

As I am neither by a thousandth part so great, nor a quarter so little,
I will herewith send you a fragment that an accidental _rencontre_ set
me upon writing, and which I find so flat, that I would not finish it.
Don't believe that I am either begging praise by the stale artifice of
hoping to be contradicted; or that I think there is any occasion to make
you discover my caducity. No; but the fragment contains a
curiosity--English verses written by a French Prince[1] of the Blood,
and which at first I had a mind to add to my "Royal and Noble Authors;"
but as he was not a royal author of ours, and as I could not please
myself with an account of him, I shall revert to