equeathe our first volume to future
generations,--and much good may it do them! Heaven grant they may be
able to read it!" Seeing that contemporary fame is the most
profitable,--that you can eat it, and drink it, and wear it upon your
back,--I own that it is the kind for which I have the most absolute
partiality. It is surely better to be spoken well of by your neighbors,
who do know you, than by those who do not know you, and who, if they
commend, may do so by sheer accident.

You never heard of Mr. Horden, of Charles Knipe, of Thomas Lupon, of
Edward Revet? Great men all, in their day! So there was Mr. John
Smith,--_clarum et venerabile nomen_!--who in 1677 wrote a comedy
called "Cytherea; or, the Enamoring Girdle." So there was Mr. Swinney,
who wrote one play called "The Quacks." So there was Mr. John Tutchin,
1685, who wrote "The Unfortunate Shepherd." So there is Mr. William
Smith, Mr. H. Smith, author of "The Princess of Parma," and Mr. Edmund
Smith, 1710, author of "Phedra and Hippolytus," who is buried in
Wiltshire, under a Latin inscription as long as my arm. There is Thomas
Yalden, D.D., 1690, who helped Dryden and Congreve in the translation
of Ovid, who wrote a Hymn to Morning, commencing vigorously thus:--

"Parent of Day! whose beauteous beams of light
Sprang from the darksome womb of night!"--

and who was a great friend of Addison, which is the best I know of him.
He might have been, like Sir Philip Sidney, "scholar, soldier, lover,
saint,"--for Doctors of Divinity have been all four,--but I declare
that I have told you all I have learned about him.

It is grievous to me, dear Bobus, a man of notorious gallantry, to find
that the ladies, after consenting to smirch their rosy fingers with
Erebean ink, are among the first who are discarded. If you will go into
the College Library, Mr. Sibley will show you a charming copy of the
works of Mrs. Behn, with a roguish, rakish, tempting little portrait of
the writer prefixed. Poor Mrs. Behn was a notability as well as a
notoriety in her day; and when I have great leisure for the work, I
mean to write her life and do her justice. The task would have been
worthy of De Foe; but, with a little help from you, I hope to do it
passably. Poor Aphra! poet, dramatist, intriguant strumpet! Worthy of
no better fate, take my benison of light laughter and of tears! Then
there is Mrs. Elizabeth Singer, who was living in 1723, who selected as
the subject of her work noth