especially from the judicious, and those who have so much delicacy themselves as not to offend mine in giving it. But then I found this consequence attending, or likely to attend, the eulogium you bestowed. If my friend thought me witty before, he shall think me ten times more witty hereafter; where I joked once, I will joke five times; and for every sensible remark, I will send him a dozen. Now this foolish vanity would have spoiled me quite, and have made me as disgusting a letter writer as Pope, who seems to have thought that unless a sentence was well turned, and every sentence pointed with some conceit, it was not worth the carriage. I was willing therefore to wait until the impression that your commendation had made on the foolish part of me was worn off, that I might scribble away as usual, and write my uppermost thoughts, and those only.” (June 8, 1780. To the Rev. W. Unwin.) No one ever avoided this danger better. It is strange and wonderful that these compositions, which bear the stamp of so much cheerfulness and benevolence, should have been written, most of them, in his deepest gloom, and avowedly for the purpose of withdrawing his thoughts from his own misery. [Illustration: [Tomb of Cowper, in East Dereham Church, Norfolk.]] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES 1. Changed “better” to “letter” on p. 28. 2. Changed “the placing the” to “the placing of the” on p. 128. 3. Silently corrected typographical errors. 4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed. 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. 6. Superscripts are denoted by a carat before a single superscript character or a series of superscripted characters enclosed in curly braces, e.g. M^r. or M^{ister}. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Vol 5 (of 7), by Anonymous