an epoch in the annals of this country.

I have delivered your message to Harte, who waits with impatience for
your letter. He is very happy now in having free access to all Lord
Craven's papers, which, he says, give him great lights into the 'bellum
tricenale'; the old Lord Craven having been the professed and valorous
knight-errant, and perhaps something more, to the Queen of Bohemia; at
least, like Sir Peter Pride, he had the honor of spending great part of
his estate in her royal cause:

I am by no means right yet; I am very weak and flimsy still; but the
doctor assures me that strength and spirits will return; if they do,
'lucro apponam', I will make the best of them; if they do not, I will not
make their want still worse by grieving and regretting them. I have lived
long enough, and observed enough, to estimate most things at their
intrinsic, and not their imaginary value; and, at seventy, I find nothing
much worth either desiring or fearing. But these reflections, which suit
with seventy, would be greatly premature at two-and-thirty. So make the
best of your time; enjoy the present hour, but 'memor ultimae'. God bless
you!

LETTER CCLXIV

BATH, December 18, 1763

MY DEAR FRIEND: I received your letter this morning, in which you
reproach me with not having written to you this week. The reason was,
that I did not know what to write. There is that sameness in my life
here, that EVERY DAY IS STILL BUT AS THE FIRST. I see very few people;
and, in the literal sense of the word, I hear nothing.

Mr. L------and Mr. C-----I hold to be two very ingenious men; and your
image of the two men ruined, one by losing his law-suit, and the other by
carrying it, is a very just one. To be sure, they felt in themselves
uncommon talents for business and speaking, which were to reimburse them.

Harte has a great poetical work to publish, before it be long; he has
shown me some parts of it. He had entitled it "Emblems," but I persuaded
him to alter that name for two reasons; the first was, because they were
not emblems, but fables; the second was, that if they had been emblems,
Quarles had degraded and vilified that name to such a degree, that it is
impossible to make use of it after him; so they are to be called fables,
though moral tales would, in my mind, be the properest name. If you ask
me what I think of those I have seen, I must say, that 'sunt plura bona,
quaedam mediocria, et quaedam----'

Your report of future