“Poor Lovel! I am in hopes of raising something for his widow by publishing his best pieces, if only enough to buy her a harpsichord. . . . . The poems will make a five-shilling volume, which I preface, and to which I shall prefix an epistle to Mary Lovel. Will you procure me some subscribers? . . . . Many a melancholy reflection obtrudes. What I am doing for him you, Bedford, may one day perform for me. How short my part in life may be He only knows who assigned it; I must be only anxious to discharge it well.
“How does time mellow down our opinions! Little of that
ardent enthusiasm which so lately fevered my whole character remains. I have
contracted my
| 276 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 22. |
“I am hardly yet in order; and, whilst that last word was writing, arrived the parcel containing what, through all my English wanderings, have accompanied me—your letters. Aye, Grosvenor, our correspondence is valuable, for it is the history of the human heart during its most interesting stages. I have now bespoke a letter-case, where they shall repose in company with another series, now, blessed be God, complete—my letters to Edith. Bedford, who will be worthy to possess them when we are gone? ‘Odi profanum vulgus;’ must I make a funeral pile by my death-bed?
“Would that I were so settled as not to look on to another removal. I want a little room to arrange my books in, and some Lares of my own. Shall we not be near one another? Aye, Bedford, as intimate as John Doe and Richard Roe, with whose memoirs I shall be so intimately acquainted; and there are two other cronies—John a Nokes, and Jack a Styles, always like Gyas and Cloanthus, and the two kings of Brentford hand in hand. Oh I will be a huge lawyer. . . . . Come soon. My ‘dearest friend’ expects you with almost as much pleasure and impatience as
