"I have this moment finished the gospel of St. Edmund, which your enthusiastic encomium had given me additional curiosity to read. As to style, he, like Shakspeare, touches the double octave from the sublime to the bathos. In many passages he is divinely eloquent; in some his wit is clean and brilliant, and his quotations remarkably lucky. His argument, with few exceptions, in my opinion, unanswerable. His work, with all its faults, does him the highest honour as an author, as a statesman, and as a moralist. It will do infinite good in France if it were possible to get it read there; but what is of far greater moment to us, it will do infinite service to us at home, in shewing us the danger of metaphysical speculations, and warning us not to go a-whoring after new inventions."
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to George Hardinge (19 November 1790) on Reflections on the Revolution in France, quoted in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons; and intended as a sequel to the Literary Anecdotes, Volume VI (1831), p. 122
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