University of Virginia Library

Letter 6
27 May 1765
NLS: MS 25295, ff. 130-131

I have just now received from a Bookseller in London your noble Present of Mr Hales's Works; for which I hold my selfe much indebted to you.

The Edition is extremely elegant; and will, I make no doubt, make its way where all the Author's fine parts & extensive Learning would, in a sordid garb, move heavily on. I have long mentioned to the most eminent London Booksellers the service they might likely do themselves, certainly the public, by reprinting in an elegant manner (for otherwise, in this trifling age, it is doing nothing) the best writers of the last age now almost forgotten, such as William's (Bp of Lincoln) fine tract of the holy alter name & thing Harsnet's (ABp of York) detection of certain Popish Impostures,[24] that has all the good sense, & what is more, the wit, of our most applauded Writers. Lord George Digby's & Ld Lucius Faulklands fine tracts agt Popery,[25] which ∧two last∧ I

spoke of lately to Mr Millar[26] who did not seem indisposed to print them together. But nothing can be printed in London approaching to the Elegance of the Glasco printers.[27] Baskerville is much inferior to two little books I have seen from them, a Cornelius Nepos & a Lucretius.[28] If we may judge by our present set of writers the age wants some good models of Composition. For it has suffered such as are so to slip out of the minds & memory of men.