Such, too, were the conversations which passed at the literary residence of the Medici family, which was described, with as much truth as fancy, as "the Lyceum of philosophy, the Arcadia of poets, and the Academy of painters." We have a pleasing instance of such a meeting of literary friends in those conversations which passed in POPE'S garden, where there was often a remarkable union of nobility and literary men.

There Thomson, Mallet, Gay, Hooke, and Glover met Cobham, Bathurst, Chesterfield, Lyttleton, and other lords; there some of these poets found patrons, and POPE himself discovered critics.

The contracted views of Spence have unfortunately not preserved these literary conversations, but a curious passage has dropped from the pen of Lord BOLINGBROKE, in what his lordship calls "a letter to Pope," often probably passed over among his political tracts.

It breathes the spirit of those delightful conversations.

"My thoughts," writes his lordship, "in what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you just _as they pass through my mind_--just as they used to be when _we conversed together_ on these or any other subject; when _we sauntered alone_, or as we have often done with good Arbuthnot, and the jocose Dean of St.Patrick, among the _multiplied scenes of your little garden._ The theatre is large enough for my ambition." Such a scene opens a beautiful subject for a curious portrait-painter.