" So there was Mr. Swinney,
who wrote one play called "The Quacks." So there was Mr. John Tutchin,
1685, who wrote "The Unfortunate Shepherd." So there is Mr. William
Smith, Mr. H. Smith, author of "The Princess of Parma," and Mr. Edmund
Smith, 1710, author of "Phedra and Hippolytus," who is buried in
Wiltshire, under a Latin inscription as long as my arm. There is Thomas
Yalden, D.D., 1690, who helped Dryden and Congreve in the translation
of Ovid, who wrote a Hymn to Morning, commencing vigorously thus:--
"Parent of Day! whose beauteous beams of light
Sprang from the darksome womb of night!"--
and who was a great friend of Addison, which is the best I know of him.
He might have been, like Sir Philip Sidney, "scholar, soldier, lover,
saint,"--for Doctors of Divinity have been all four,--but I declare
that I have told you all I have learned about him.
It is grievous to me, dear Bobus, a man of notorious gallantry, to find
that the ladies, after consenting to smirch their rosy fingers with
Erebean ink, are among the first who are discarded. If you will go into
the College Library, Mr. Sibley will show you a charming copy of the
works of Mrs. Behn, with a roguish, rakish, tempting little portrait of
the writer prefixed.
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