“No botanist am I; nor wished to learn from _you_, of all the Muses, that _piping_ has a new signification. I had rather that _you_ handled an oaten pipe than a carnation one; yet setting layers, I own, is preferable to reading newspapers, one of the chronical maladies of this age. Everybody reads them, nay, quotes them, though everybody knows they are stuffed with lies or blunders. How should it be otherwise? If any extraordinary event happens, who but must hear it before it descends through a coffee-house to the runner of a daily paper? They who are always wanting news, are wanting to hear they don’t know what. A lower species, indeed, is that of the scribes you mention, who every night compose a journal for the satisfaction of such _illiterati_, and feed them with all the vices and misfortunes of every private family; nay, they now call it a _duty_ to publish all those calamities which decency to wretched relations used in compassion to suppress, I mean self-murder in particular. Mr. Hesse’s was detailed at length; and to-day that of Lord Saye and Sele. The pretence is, _in terrorem_, like the absurd stake and highway of our ancestors; as if there were a precautionary potion for madness, or the stigma of a newspaper were more dreadful than death. Daily journalists, to be sure, are most respectable magistrates! Yes, much like the cobblers that Cromwell made peers. “I do lament your not going to Mr. Conway’s play: both the author and actors deserved such an auditor as you, and you deserved to hear them. However, I do not pity _good_ people who out of virtue lose or miss any pleasures. Those pastimes fleet as fast as those of the wicked; but, when gone, you saints can sit down and feast on your self-denial, and drink bumpers of satisfaction to the health of your own merit. So truly I don’t pity you. “You say you hear no news, yet you quote Mr. Topham;[111] therefore why should I tell you that the King is going to Cheltenham? or that the Baccelli lately danced at the Opera at Paris with a blue bandeau on her forehead, inscribed, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_! “Well! would we committed nothing but follies! What do we not commit when the abolition of slavery hitches! Adieu! “Though Cato died, though Tully spoke, Though Brutus dealt the godlike stroke, Yet perish’d fated Rome. “_You_ have written; and I fear that even, if Mr. Sheridan speaks, trade, the modern religion, will predominate. Adieu!” Our next extract contains an account of an incident which proved more fortunate for the writer than anything that happened to him during the remainder of his life. It is from a letter to Lady Ossory, dated Strawberry Hill, October 11, 1788. Horace writes: