Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/33

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Dr. THOMAS RUNDLE
13

Talbot. In person he was slender and "not inelegantly formed"; his portrait was in the collection of Seeker when bishop of Oxford.

The sermons of Rundle have passed into the limbo of forgetfulness. His "anticipation of the posthumous character of sir Richard Steele" has long ceased to influence the opinion of the literary world. But his letters to Mrs Barbara Sandys, the daughter of a Kyrle who claimed kinship with "the man of Ross" and the wife of a Gloucestershire squire, are still worthy of perusal. They were edited by the rev. James Dallaway who asked for information about Rundle and obtained some particulars (Gent. Mag. 1789, p. 206) of him from Thomas Taylor, of Denbury near Ashburton, the son of his old friend and the owner of many letters by him, which have probably now perished. The bishop sends her books and periodicals, discourses amiably on literary and theological questions, and occasionally mentions a personal incident in the career of a man once prominent in life. His letters show him sympathetic in disposition and grateful for past acts of kindness. He was far from being the least worthy member of the episcopal bench in Ireland.