We find Wilkes as a _poseur_ on literature in one of these entertaining letters to "dearest Polly." He indites from his cottage of Sandham a June letter wherein he says how impatient he is for "the descending showers to call forth all Nature's sweets, and waken all her flowers, for the earth is as thirsty as Boswell, and as cracked in many places as he certainly is in one. His book, however, is that of an entertaining madman. Poor Johnson! Does a friend come and add to the gross character of such a man the unknown trait of disgusting gluttony? I shall bring his two quartos back with me, and will point out numberless mistakes; but there are many excellent things in them. I suspect, not unfrequently, a mistake in the _Dramatis Personæ_. He has put down to _Boswell_ what was undoubtedly said by _Johnson_; what the latter did, and what the former could not say. The motto to his book should have been the two lines of Pope, 'Who tells whate'er you think, whate'er you say, And if he lies not, must at least betray.'" But he has a playful and somewhat engaging style of writing, on occasion. Perpend:-- "_'Anchor,' at Liphook, "Friday Afternoon, July 8, 1791._ "MY DEAREST POLLY, "I have found the tench here so remarkably delicate, that nothing could add to their flavour on a certain Alderman's palate but the eating them in your company. They were, indeed, exquisite, and I see a brace playing about, which seem to promise equally. I have therefore spoiled their sport in the watery element, and as they set out this evening, before ten, it is thought they will arrive in Grosvenor Square to-morrow morning, in time for you to decide, at four, if their personal merit is equal to that of their late companions. Two little feathered folks, young and tender, of the same farm, accompany them in their journey, and I hope are not unworthy of being _croqués_. "My best compliments to the nymph of the bosquets in Grosvenor Square. "Adieu!" The inclemency of the merry month of May is not of modern date, for Wilkes, who had been travelling from Grosvenor Square to Sandown on the sixth of that treacherous month, in the year of grace 1792, found a fire at the hospitable "Anchor" as welcome as fires generally are in dreary autumn. "After I left Grosvenor Square," he says, "quite to Liphook, it rained incessantly, and I enjoyed a good fire there as much as I should have done on a raw day of the month of November. I found the spring very backward, except in the immediate environs of London; and nothing but a little purple heath and yellow broom to cheer the eye in the long dreary extent from Guildford to Liphook." [Sidenote: _TRAVELLING EXPERIENCES_]