DEAR C,—We will with great pleasure be with you on Thursday in the next week early. Your finding out my style in your nephew’s pleasant book is surprising to me. I want eyes to descry it. You are a little too hard upon his morality, though I confess he has more of Sterne about him than of Sternhold. But he saddens into excellent sense before the conclusion. Your query shall be submitted to Miss Kelly, though it is obvious that the pantomime, when done, will be more easy to decide upon than in proposal. I say, do it by all means. I have Decker’s play by me, if you can filch anything out of it. Miss Gray, with her kitten eyes, is an actress, though she shows it not at all, and pupil to the former, whose gestures she mimics in comedy to the disparagement of her own natural manner, which is agreeable. It is funny to see her bridling up her neck, which is native to F. K.; but there is no setting another’s manners upon one’s shoulders any more than their head. I am glad you esteem Manning, though you see but his husk or shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshippers, and will leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is. I am perfecting myself in the “Ode to Eton College” against Thursday, that I may not appear unclassic. I have just discovered that it is much better than the “Elegy.”
P.S.—I do not know what to say to your latest theory about Nero being the Messiah, though by all accounts he was a ’nointed one.
