THERE is no collection of letters belonging to the eighteenth

century that has not an interest to-day. The commonest trivialities take on a serious air with age, and it is from letters alone that we can sincerely and honestly reconstruct the past. Therefore we welcome the correspondence which passed between two respectable clergymen some hundred and fifty years ago. The letters are not very wise, and they are not at all clever. And for that very reason they are the more valuable. Here, in fact, you may see how a couple of parsons thought and wrote,—a couple of parsons who had no desire to con- ciliate this party or that, but who were content to exchange their views of to-day without a thought of the morrow.

Who, then, were the correspondents? The first was one Edmund Pyle, who came of a good Norfolk family, and was entered at Corpus Christi College in 1720. His career at Cambridge appears to have been inglorious, for his father in a letter addressed to Kerrich confesses that his son " has very great desires to retrieve the favour he may have lost in Bennet College." Whether the desire was sincere or not, the retrieval was easily made, for he was elected a Fellow of Clam Hall in 1729, and a year later was presented to St. Nicholas's Chapel at Lynn. Thereafter his career was easy and prosperous. About 1740 he was appointed Chaplain to the King, and was thus secure both of respect and of an income. His correspondent, Samuel Kerrich, was an older and a weightier man. Born in 1696, he also in due season entered Corpus Christi (or Bennet) College, and he was a grave and serious Fellow when Pyle arrived at Cambridge. However, their friendship was made early, and was long maintained, and to it we owe the letters which are the real excuse of the present book.

Pyle's letters to Kerrich begin as early as 1729, when Pyle thanks his correspondent for his "recommendation of me to the gentlemen of Clare Hall," and they continue in unbroken sequence to the year 1763. Though Pyle had every oppor- tunity of collecting the gossip of the Court, he was not too intelligent, and if you would understand the history of the times froin his letters, you must carry with you a fair amount of knowledge. But if Pyle was not too wise, he did not fear to express his own strong opinions, and you may gather many a hint of the social history of the eighteenth century from his observations. He tells us, for instance, that in 1742 the spotted fever prevailed at Cambridge. Again, later he quotes Lord Carteret as saying that the Duke of Cumberland "received a shot in his leg, which pierced the calf of his leg, but the bone is not hurt. He is very well and in high spirits." But what we like best in Edmund Pyle is his determination to make the best of life. " By the way," he writes in 1743, "I am determined to take my old liberties of eating, smoking, and talking just as I please, having been all this winter in high health and very saucy spirits." "Very saucy spirits" is admirable, and it is evident that the King's Chaplain had no belief in the mortification of the flesh. He. liked his glass of wine, and he faced the necessary gout like a man. He liked to live freely, and if he suffered for it, that was his affair, and he did not flinch'. He drank port always, and he bought it in the wood; and if it was immature, he suffered.from it with a fine courage. His letters are full of allusions to the gout, but never does he whine about it; and when he complains, he complains no more loudly than becomes a man. He regards his diseases some- what in the epirit wherewith Montaigne regarded his,—without spite and without rancour. " I am just got abroad," says he, "after three weeks in confinement with a poor-spirited slow fever, not fit for a gentleman's constitution. The gout, which is fit for a man of quality, made an effort to relieve me, but went off; so I was consigned over to the joys of bleeding, vomiting, rubarb, salt of wormwood, and Jesuit powder." That shows the proper spirit. If Pyle hated the fever, he respected gout as highly as Montaigne respected the stone, and did not mind suffering so long as his pain became a person of quality: . Indeed, he speaks of the.diseasie as of an old friend. "I have had the gout very favourably," says he in 1749, " and was scarcely ever in so good health in' my life as just 'now." But the note of

• Memoirs of a Royal Chaplain, 1729-1763 the Correspondence of Edmund

Pyle, D.D., with Samuel Kerrich, D.D. Annotated and Edited byA. rue. London : John Lane. Lies. net.]

"I have tried some tricks for the gout," says he, " and thanks to my constitution, am not killed. The Duke of Portland's Powder was the last. You shall never catch me at doing any thing more for it. He that is subject to it had better bear the fits, as nature throws them out of her way, which if you do farce licet usque recurret." That is the sportsmanlike view to take of it. But it did not avail. A few years later

he is badly handled the whole winter by gout, and all the waters of Bath could not cure him. Yet the misfortunes which overtook him were the misfortunes of the time, and he bore them like the man he was.

Of politics he entertained strong views, which were often sound. He has a deep-rooted dislike of the Townshend family, and he never ceased to deplore their morals and influence. "The two Townshends," he wrote in 1756, "will not be taken notice of. They are looked upon as a couple of Profligate Creatures, who will stick at nothing to serve their own purposes of revenge or interest. Charles professes, fearlessly, a contempt of all ties but that of interest. The other does not profess this, but is not better than he who does." Though that is not flattering, worse remains behind.

If Charles was the worse in 1756, George deserved the heavier condemnation in 1759. In that year George Townshend fought a duel with Lord Leicester, and Pyle does not spare

" Lord L.," he writes, " is dead since you wrote. I wish, with 1,000 more, that his antagonist were in the shades too (provided that his family were no sufferers): for I hold him, and his brother, Charles, to be two most dangerous men ;

as having parts that enable them to do great mischief, and no principles that lead them to do any good." And the case

against George Townshend was peculiarly strong, because he was drunk when he sent the • challenge to Lord Leicester, and because, whatever Lord Leicester had said about the Militia Bill, he had said worse about- all the institutions of the country. " His licentious tongue," says Pyle, " spares not the most sacred characters. King—priest—prophet—minister

—general—all have felt the lash of his wit (as he takes it to be) in scurrilous language, in burlesque prints, and in every way that would render them the joke of the very scum of the people." That is a violent censure; but Pyle had a bitter pen, and did not spare better men than George Townshend.

His opinion of Pitt is curious, because it probably represents the folly of the Court. It is also perfectly conventional, and does little credit to Pyle's wisdom. Here it is, written in 1761, word for word :-

" Of politicks I have nothing to say. Whatever Mr. Pitt may be, or may not be—I care not. He may have been a good Minister, or not, for what I know. But I am sure he is a very inconsistent and shameless man. For he worked himself into power by incessant and intemperate declamation against spending a penny or sending a man to the help of Hanover, and when ho was in power he raised and spent ten times more money in the defence of the country than ever any Minister before dared so much as to think of ; and when ho had involved himself so that he did not know what to do—went out in a huff, in order to become a popular idol."

No more foolish judgment than this could be found in literature. But its very folly makes it valuable. We can easily discover our own wisdom. We cannot invent the sincere opinion of Pitt's passably intelligent contemporaries. Indeed, whatever Pyle says is worth reading. It is only when Mr. Hartshorne intervenes that we are sorry. For he is the very worst editor that ever was, and he entertains a patient faith that everybody is as ignorant of the eighteenth century

as he was when he began to edit the correspondence of Edmund Pyle.