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DEAR SIR, I HAD the pleasure of yours some posts ago, and have delayed answering it hitherto, that I might be able to determine when I could have the happiness of waiting upon you.

Hagley is the place in England I most desire to see; I imagine it to be greatly delightful in itself, and I know it to be so in the highest degree by the company it is animated with. Some reasons prevent my waiting upon you immediately; but if you will be so good as to let me know how long you design to stay in the country, nothing shall hinder me from passing three weeks or a month with you before you leave it.

As this will fall in autumn, I shall like it the better; for I think that season of the year the most pleasing, and the most poetical; the spirits are not then dissipated with the gaiety of spring, and the glaring light of summer, but composed into a serious and tempered joy.

The year is perfect. In the mean time I will go on with correcting the Seasons, and hope to carry down more than one of them with me.

The Muses, whom you obliging say I shall bring along with me, I shall find with you: the muses of the great simple country, not the little fine-lady muses of Richmond-hill. I have lived so long in the noise, or at least the distant din of the town, that I begin to forget what retirement is; with you I shall enjoy it in its highest elegance and purest simplicity.

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have very little to say that is worthy to be transThe world either mitted over the great ocean. fertilizes so much, or we grow so dead to it, that its transactions make but feeble impressions on us. Retirement and nature are more and more my passion every day. And now, even now, the charming time comes on: heaven is just on the point, or rather in the very act of giving earth a green gown, the voice of the nightingale is heard in our lanes.

You must know that I have enlarged my rural domain, much to the same dimensions you have done yours. The two fields next to me, from the first of which I have walled-no, no-paled in about as much as my garden consisted of before; so that the walk runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of the day, and sometimes under night. For you, I imagine you reclining under cedars and palmettoes, and there enjoying more magnificent slumbers than are known to the pale climates of the north: slumbers rendered awful and divine, by the solemn stillness and deep fervours of the torrid noon! At other times I imagine you drinking punch in groves of lime or orange trees; gathering pine apples from hedges, as commonly as we may blackberries; poetising under lofty laurels, or making love under full-spread myrtles.

But to lower my style a little; as I am such a genuine lover of gardening, why don't you remember me in that instance, and send me some seeds of things that might succeed here during the summer, though they cannot perfect their seed sufficiently in this, to them, ungenial climate, to propagate;

in which case is the calliloo, that from the seed it bore here came up puny, rickety, and good for nothing. There are other things certainly with you, not yet brought over hither, that might flourish here in the summer time, and live tolerably well, provided they be sheltered in an hospitable stove or greenhouse during the winter. You will give me no small pleasure, by sending me, from time to time, some of these seeds, if it were no more but to amuse me in making the trial.

With regard to the brother gardeners, you ought to know, that as they are half vegetables, the animal part of them will never have spirit enough to consent to the transplanting of the vegetable into distant dangerous climates. They, happily for themselves, have no other idea but to dig on here, eat, drink, sleep, and kiss their wives.

As to more important business, I have nothing to write to you. You know best the course of it. Be (as you always must be) just and honest; but if you are are unhappily romantic, you shall come home without money, and write a tragedy on yourself *. Mr. Lyttleton told me that the Grenvilles had strongly recommended the person the governor and you proposed for that considerable office, lately fallen vacant in your department; and that there were good hopes of succeeding. He told me also that Mr. Pitt had said, that it was not to be expected that offices, such as that is, for which the greatest interest is made here at

* Patterson had written a tragedy, when in London, with little success.

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