keeping, and teaching them to sing, for discovering and caring their
diseases, and of learning them to sing to the greatest perfection_.

Although there is little surviving evidence of Morris's purely
literary interests, a set of verses combining his economic and
artistic views appeared in a late edition of _The New Foundling
Hospital for Wit_ (new edition, 1784, VI, 95). Occasioned by seeing
Bowood in Wiltshire, the home of the Earl of Shelburne, the lines are
entitled: "On Reading Dr. Goldsmith's Poem, the Deserted Village."

This was the man who at the age of thirty-three brought out _An Essay
towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire,
and Ridicule_. That it was ever widely read we have no evidence, but
at least a number of men of wit and judgment found it interesting.
Horace Walpole included it in a packet of "the only new books at all
worth reading" sent to Horace Mann, but the fulsome dedication
to the elder Walpole undoubtedly had something to do with this
recommendation. More disinterested approval is shown in a letter
printed in the _Daily Advertiser_ for 31 May 1744. Better than any
modern critique the letter illustrates the contemporary reaction to
the _Essay_.

Christ Church College, Oxford,

SIR:

I have examin'd the _Essay_ you have sent me for _fixing the true
Standards of Wit, Humour, &c._ and cannot perceive upon what
pretence the Definitions, as you tell me, are censured for
Obscurity, even by Gentlemen of Abilities, and such as in other