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74

LIFE OF EDMOND MALONE.

Will you, my dear Malone, be so kind in your morning walk as to call upon this lady, and read to her the above paragraph, as such communication will be the most satisfactory answer I can give to her letter. The same time, you will be so kind as to mention the circumstance and my resolution to the person in whose behalf the postscript in your letter was written. Perhaps matters may be settled amicably between him and Mrs. Hogarth, in which case I have no objection, provided the execution be such as not to disgrace the picture or its author, that the drawing be made in Dublin, and that Mrs. Hogarth be perfectly contented, and shall declare her satisfaction by a certificate in her own handwriting. I know your goodness will pardon all this trouble from, &c. &c.
Don’t forget to worry Elmsley about the Life of Petrarch.


In December (1781), his lordship forwards to his friend for publication in the newspapers a protest originating with him in the Irish House of Lords. It is accompanied by a political letter not necessary to find place here, but contains the passage already quoted, which drew forth Malone’s avowal of the state of his heart for so long a period. In the middle of it we find an outbreak of one of the prevailing passions:—“If you should happen to meet with Fleming’s Bucolics and Georgics of Virgil, London, 4to, 1585, and Phaer’s Æneid, first edition of seven books only (I have the second), I should be glad to purchase them, as I would bind them with Hervey’s fourth book. I should wish also to procure an edition of Surrey’s translation, which as I am told, contains the first and fourth books. Mine has only the fourth, and is, I believe, the first edition.”

Familiarity with Shakspeare led our critic onward to a still more remote age, in a tilt against the poems of Rowley. The fate of their alleged discoverer,

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