To the Rev. John Newton. [601]
Weston, July 22, 1791.
My dear Friend,—I did not foresee, when I challenged you to a brisker correspondence, that a new engagement of all my leisure was at hand: a new and yet an old one. An interleaved copy of my Homer arrived soon after from Johnson, in which he recommended it to me to make any alterations that might yet be expedient, with a view to another impression. The alterations that I make are indeed but few, and they are also short; not more, perhaps, than half a line in two thousand. But the lines are, I suppose, nearly forty thousand in all, and to revise them critically must consequently be a work of labour. I suspend it, however, for your sake, till the present sheet be filled, and that I may not seem to shrink from my own offer.
Mr. Bean has told me that he saw you at Bedford, and gave us your reasons for not coming our way. It is well, so far as your own comfortable lodging and our gratification were concerned, that you did not; for our house is brimful, as it has been all the summer, with my relations from Norfolk. We should all have been mortified, both you and we, had you been obliged, as you must have been, to seek a residence elsewhere.
I am sorry that Mr. Venn's[602] labours below are so near to a conclusion. I have seen few men whom I could have loved more, had opportunity been given me to know him better. So, at least, I have thought as often as I have seen him. But when I saw him last, which is some years since, he appeared then so much broken that I could not have imagined that he would last so long. Were I capable of envying, in the strict sense of the word, a good man, I should envy him, and Mr. Berridge,[603] and yourself, who have spent, and while they last, will continue to spend, your lives in the service of the only Master worth serving; labouring always for the souls of men, and not to tickle their ears, as I do. But this I can say—God knows how much rather I would be the obscure tenant of a lath-and-plaster cottage, with a lively sense of my interest in a Redeemer, than the most admired object of public notice without it. Alas! what is a whole poem, even one of Homer's, compared with a single aspiration that finds its way immediately to God, though clothed in ordinary language, or perhaps not articulated at all! These are my sentiments as much as ever they were, though my days are all running to waste among Greeks and Trojans. The night cometh when no man can work; and, if I am ordained to work to better purpose, that desirable period cannot be very distant. My day is beginning to shut in, as every man's must who is on the verge of sixty.
All the leisure that I have had of late for thinking, has been given to the riots at Birmingham. What a horrid zeal for the church, and what a horrid loyalty to government, have manifested themselves there! How little do they dream that they could not have dishonoured their idol, the Establishment, more, and that the great Bishop of souls himself with abhorrence rejects their service! But I have not time to enlarge; breakfast calls me; and all my post-breakfast time must be given to poetry. Adieu!
Most truly yours,
W. C.