ods
of roses. Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the
vicious-abstract offences, not the concrete sinner. But you are
sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a
compliment, as another man would at the perpetration of an affront. But
do not lug me into the same soreness of conscience with yourself. I
maintain, and will to the last hour, that I never writ of you but _con
amore_. That if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was
not for the purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with
scholar-like habits: for is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat
near of sight, before age naturally brings on the malady? You could not
then plead the _obrepens senectus_. Did I not moreover make it an
apology for a certain _absence_, which some of your friends may have
experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a
casual street-meeting, and did I not strengthen your excuse for this
slowness of recognition, by further accounting morally for the present
engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not, in your person,
make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever
made? If these things be not so, I never knew what I wrote or meant by
my writing, and have been penning libels all my life without being aware
of it. Does it follow that I should have exprest myself exactly in the
same way of those dear old eyes of yours _now_--now that Father Time has
conspired with a hard task-master to put a last extinguisher upon them?
I should as soon have insulted the Answerer of Salmasius, when he awoke
up from his ended task, and saw no more with mortal vision. But you are
many films removed yet from Milton's calamity. You write perfectly
intelligibly. Marry, the letters are not all of the same size or
tallness; but that only shows your proficiency in the _hands_--text,
german-hand, court-hand, sometimes law-hand, and affords variety. You
pen better than you did a twelvemonth ago; and if you continue to
improve, you bid fair to win the golden pen which is the prize at your
young gentlemen's academy. But you must beware of Valpy, and his
printing-house, that hazy cave of Trophonius, out of which it was a
mercy that you escaped with a glimmer. Beware of MSS. and Variae
Lectiones. Settle the text for once in your mind, and stick to it. You
have some years' good sight in you yet, if you do not tamper with it. It
is not for you (for _