es to the dear countess, to say that dear Lord Lollypop is
getting on very well at St. Boniface, and that the accident which he met
with in a scuffle with an inebriated bargeman only showed his spirit and
honor, and will not permanently disfigure his lordship's nose. He gets
his clothes from dear Lollypop's London tailor, and wears a mauve or
magenta tie when he rides out to see the hounds. A love of fashionable
people is a weakness, I do not say of all, but of some tutors. Witness
that Eton tutor t'other day, who intimated that in Cornhill we could not
understand the perfect purity, delicacy, and refinement of those genteel
families who sent their sons to Eton. O usher, mon ami! Old Sam Johnson,
who, too, had been an usher in his early life, kept a little of that
weakness always. Suppose Goldsmith had knocked him up at three in the
morning and proposed a boat to Greenwich, as Topham Beauclerc and his
friend did, would he have said, "What, my boy, are you for a frolic? I'm
with you!" and gone and put on his clothes? Rather he would have pitched
poor Goldsmith down stairs. He would have liked to be port if he could.
Of course WE wouldn't. Our opinion of the Portugal grape is known. It
grows very high, and is very sour, and we don't go for that kind of
grape at all.

"I was walking with Mr. Fox"--and sure this anecdote comes very pat
after the grapes--"I was walking with Mr. Fox in the Louvre," says
Benjamin West (apud some paper I have just been reading), "and I
remarked how many people turned round to look at ME. This shows the
respect of the French for the fine arts." This is a curious instance
of a very small claret indeed, which imagined itself to be port of the
strongest body. There are not many instances of a faith so deep, so
simple, so satisfactory as this. I have met many who would like to be
port; but with few of the Gascon sort, who absolutely believed they
WERE port. George III. believed in West's port and thought Reynolds's
overrated stuff. When I saw West's pictures at Philadelphia, I looked
at them with astonishment and awe. Hide, blushing glory, hide your head
under your old nightcap. O immortality! is this the end of you? Did any
of you, my dear brethren, ever try and read "Blackmore's Poems," or
the "Epics of Baour-Lormian," or the "Henriade," or--what shall we
say?--Pollok's "Course of Time?" They were thought to be more lasting
than brass by some people, and where are they now? And OUR masterpieces
of