am reading Burnet's Own Times. Did you ever read that garrulous,
pleasant history? He tells his story like an old man past political
service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in
public transactions, when his "old cap was new." Full of scandal, which
all true history is. No palliatives, but all the stark wickedness, that
actually gives the _momentum_ to national actors. Quite the prattle of
age and out-lived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you
perpetually in _alto relievo_. Himself a party man--he makes you a party
man. None of the Damned philosophical Humeian indifference, so cold, and
unnatural, and inhuman! None of the damned Gibbonian fine writing, so
fine and composite. None of Mr. Robertson's periods with three members.
None of Mr. Roscoe's sage remarks, all so apposite, and coming in so
clever, lest the reader should have had the trouble of drawing an
inference. Burnet's good old prattle I can bring present to my mind--I
can make the revolution present to me; the French Revolution, by a
converse perversity in my nature, I fling as far _from_ me. To quit this
damn'd subject, and to relieve you from two or three dismal yawns, which
I hear in spirit, I here conclude my more than commonly obtuse letter;
dull up to the dulness of a Dutch commentator on Shakspeare.

My love to Lloyd and Sophia. C. L.

["War and Nature, and Mr. Pitt." The war had sent up taxation to an
almost unbearable height. Pitt was Chancellor of Exchequer, as well as
Prime Minister.

Hume, Gibbon and Robertson were among the books which, in the Elia essay
"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," Lamb described as
_biblia-a-biblia_. William Roscoe's principal work was his _Life of
Lorenzo de' Medici_, 1795.]