The Correspondence of Thomas Gray and William Mason; With Letters to the REV. James Brown (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: which is always disagreeable to an amicable reader, nor embarrassed by a burthen of terms recherche, which is always fully as unpleasing to a negligent writer,?is the very thing which I should always labour to attain in my productions of this kind, though perhaps my aim is totally chimerical, as the style I speak of may be called with the poet " A faultless monster, which the world ne'er saw." Therefore, without further apology, I shall trust to the sincerity of your friendship for a plenary absolution in this case, and proceed in all the simplicity of narration. Germany is a country?but why should I tell my friend who has seen France, who has seen Italy, what kind of a country is Germany? and yet perhaps he will not despise me for it; for though France is remarkable for its savoir vivre and Italy for its virtu, yet Germany is the reservoir of solid literature, and therefore not unworthy of the attention of a person who unites all these qualifications in his own particular, and may be called without flattery a microcosm of the talents both of his own island and the continent; but hard, very hard, is my fate, that I cannot give him any satisfactory account of the state of the Germanic learning,having only as yet had a single interview with Myn Herr , the royal librarian of this place. Mynn Herr is of a roundish, squab figure, and of a face corresponding, that is, as his body is cylindrical, his face is rather circular than oval; he apparels himself generally in a decent grass-green suit, with a fair full peruke, not too full to break upon the spherical form of his cheeks, and yet full enough to add a graceful squareness on each side of them; the altitude of his square-toed shoe heels, the breadth of his milk-and-watered rollups, and the size of his amber-headed ca...