he author, and he has given me a very bad
one of his subject. By the Doctor's labour and impartiality, Erasmus
appears a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover truth, and
not courage enough to profess it: whose vanity made him always writing;
yet his writings ought to have cured his vanity, as they were the most
abject things in the world. _Good Erasmus's honest mean_ was alternate
time-serving. I never had thought much about him, and now heartily
despise him.

[Footnote 1: "_You prefer Lord Clarendon to Polybius._" It is hard to
understand this sentence. Lord Clarendon did _not_ write a general
history, but an account of a single event, "The Great Rebellion." It was
Polybius who wrote a "Universal History," of which, however, only five
books have been preserved, the most interesting portion of which is a
narrative of Hannibal's invasion of Italy and march over the Alps in the
Second Punic War.]

[Footnote 2: Dr. Jortin was Archdeacon of London; and, among other
works, had recently published a life of the celebrated Erasmus, the
mention of whom by Pope, which Walpole presently quotes, is not very
unfairly interpreted by Walpole.]

When I speak my opinion to you, Sir, about what I dare say you care as
little for as I do, (for what is the merit of a mere man of letters?) it
is but fit I should answer you as sincerely on a question about which
you are so good as to interest yourself. That my father's life is likely
to be written, I have no grounds for believing. I mean I know nobody
that thinks of it. For, myself, I certainly shall not, for many reasons,
which you must have the patience to hear. A reason to me myself is, that
I think too highly of him, and too meanly of myself, to presume I am
equal to the task. They who do not agree with me in the former part of
my position, will undoubtedly allow the latter part. In the next place,
the very truths that I should relate would be so much imputed to
partiality, that he would lose of his due praise by the suspicion of my
prejudice. In the next place, I was born too late in his life to be
acquainted with him in the active part of it. Then I was at school, at
the university, abroad, and returned not till the last moments of his
administration. What I know of him I could only learn from his own mouth
in the last three years of his life; when, to my shame, I was so idle,
and young, and thoughtless, that I by no means profited of his leisure
as I might have done; an