long dissertations are inserted in either volume; the literature in them
excellent, the politics not so good: the volumes, as well as the several
parts of them, are dedicated to some Royal and many Noble Patrons. Gordon
has also turned Sallust into English: the book was published in 1744, in
one handsome quarto; "with Political Discourses upon that Author and
Translations of Cicero's Four Orations against Cataline." Walpole made
Gordon the first commissioner of wine licences. It is handed down, that
Gordon was a burly person, "large and corpulent." It is believed, that he
found his way into "The Dunciad," and that he is immortalised there among
the "Canaille Ecrivante;" the line

_Where Tindal dictates and Silenus snores_,

is taken to be Pope's description of him. Gordon died in 1750; at the same
time as Dr. Middleton, the elegant biographer of Cicero: Lord Bolingbroke
is said to have observed, when the news was told him, "Then is the best
writer in England gone, and the worst." That Bolingbroke should have
disliked Gordon and his politics, does not surprise me; but I cannot
understand for what reason he, and other good judges, despised his
writings. "The chief glory of every people arises from its authors," Dr.
Johnson says; and happy the people, I would assert, who have no worse
writers than Thomas Gordon. I wish to draw attention to Gordon's correct
vocabulary, to his bold and pregnant language, and to his scholarly
punctuation. Among our present writers, the art of punctuation is a lost
accomplishment; and it is usual now to find writings with hardly anything
but full stops; colons and semicolons are almost obsolete; commas are
neglected, or misused; and our slovenly pages are strewn with dashes, the
last resources of an untidy thinker, the certain witnesses to a careless
and unfinished sentence. How different, and how superior, is the way of
Gordon; who, though he can be homely and familiar, never lays aside the