He tells us
this palace was surrounded by an army of statues, "not one
made to represent any object in nature. He has put the heads
of men to the bodies of every sort of animal, and the heads of
every other animal to the bodies of men. Sometimes he makes a
compound of five or six animals that have no sort of
resemblance in nature. He puts the head of a lion on the neck
of a goose, the body of a lizard, the legs of a goat, the tail
of a fox; on the back of this monster he puts another, if
possible still more hideous, with five or six heads, and a
bush of horns. There is no kind of horn in the world he has
not collected, and his pleasure is to see them all flourishing
upon the same head." The interior of the house was decorated
in the same monstrous style, and the description, unique of
its kind, occupies several pages of Mr. Brydone's book.--ED.

[154] This letter was written in 1726, and first found by Dr. Knight
in 1750, in fitting up a house where Concanen had probably
lodged. It was suppressed, till Akenside, in 1766, printed it
in a sixpenny pamphlet, entitled "An Ode to Mr. Edwards." He
preserved the curiosity, with "all its peculiarities of
grammar, spelling, and punctuation." The insulted poet took a
deep revenge for the contemptuous treatment he had received
from the modern Stagirite. The "peculiarities" betray most
evident marks of the self-taught lawyer; the orthography and
the double letters were minted in the office. [Thus he speaks
of Addison as this "exact _Mr._ of propriety," and of his own
studies of the English poets "to trace them to their sources;
and observe what _oar_, as well as what slime and gravel they
brought down with them."] When I looked for the letter in
_Akenside's Works_, I discovered that it had been silently
dropped. Some interest, doubtless, had been made to suppress
it, for Warburton was humbled when reminded of it. Malone,
fortunately, has preserved it in his Shakspeare, where it may
be found, in a place not likely to be looked into for it, at
the close of _Julius Caesar_: this literary curiosity had
otherwise been lost for posterity; its whole history is a
series of wonderful escapes.

By this d