Faculty, both in
Thought and Word, that I really do not know where to match in any work of
the kind. I could make comparisons with the best: but I don't like
comparisons. But I think your Work will last, as I think of very few
Books indeed. You are yet two good years from sixty (Mr. Norton tells
me), and have yet at least a dozen more of Dryden's later harvest: pray
make good use of it: Cervantes, at any rate, I think to live to read,
though one of your great merits is, not being in a hurry: and so your
work completes itself. But I nearer seventy than you sixty. . . .

You should get Dryden's Prefaces published separately in America, with
your own remarks on them, and also Johnson's very fine praise: in which
he praises Dryden for those unexpected turns in which he himself is so
deficient. But pray love old Johnson, a little more than I think you do.
We have, you may know, a rather clumsy Edition of this Dryden Prose in
four 8vo volumes by Malone; the first volume all Life and a few Letters.
I have bought some three or four Copies of this work, more or less worse
for wear, to give away: one extra Copy, much the worse for wear, on a
back shelf now, waiting its destination. No English Publisher, I
suppose, would do this work, unless under some great name: perhaps under
yours, if your own Country were not the fitter place. As in the case of
your Essays, I don't pretend to say which is finest: but I think that to
me Dryden's Prose, _quoad_ Prose, is the finest Style of all. So Gray, I
believe, thought: that man of Taste, very far removed, perhaps as far as
feminine from masculine, from the Man he admired.

Your Wordsworth should introduce any future Edition of him, as I think
some of Ste. Beuve's Essays do some of his men. He rarely, you know,
gets beyond French.

Now, as I see my Paper draws short, I turn from your Works to those of
'The Great Twalmley,' viz.: the Dialogue I mentioned, and you ask for. I
really got it out: but, on reading it again after many years, was so much
disappointed even in the little I expected that I won't send it to you,
or any one more. It is only eighty 12 mo pages, and about twenty too
long, and the rest over-pointed (Oh Cervantes!), and all somewhat
antiquated. But the Form of it is pretty: and the little Narrative part:
and one day I may strike out, etc., and make you a present of a pretty
Toy. But it won't do now.

I have at last bid Adieu to poor old Dunwich: the Robin sin