I feel, it was confined to the memory of those I love.  It seems to me impossible for a man who has no friends to do any Thing for fame—­and to me the first position in friendship is, to intend one’s friends should survive one-but it is not reasonable to oppress you, who are suffering gout, with my melancholy ideas.  Let me know as you mend.  What I have said, will tell you, what I hope so many years have told you, that I am very constant and sincere to friends of above forty years.  I doubt Mr. Essex perceived that my mind was greatly bewildered- He gave me a direction to Mr. Penticross, who I recollect, Mr. Gray, not you, told me was turned a Methodist teacher.  He was a blue-coat boy, and came hither then to some of my servants, having at that age a poetic turn.  As he has reverted to it, I hope the enthusiasm will take a more agreeable plea.  I have not heard of him for many Years, and thought he was settled somewhere near Cambridge:  I find it is at Wallingford.  I wonder those madmen and knaves do not begin to wear out, as their folly is no longer new, and as knavery can turn its hand to any trade according to the humour of the age, which in countries like this is seldom constant.  Yours most faithfully.

Letter 113 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.  Strawberry Hill, August 19, 1776. (page 159)

I have time but to write you a line, and it is as usual to beg your help in a sort of literary difficulty.  I have received a letter dated , “Catherine Hall” from “Ken.  Prescot,” whom I doubt I have forgotten; for he begins “Dear Sir,” and I protest I cannot recollect him, though I ought.  He says he wants to send me a few classical discourses, and e speaks with respect of my father, and, by his trembling hand, seems an old man.  All these are reasons for my treating him with great regard; and, being afraid of hurting him, I have written a short and very civil answer, directed to the “Rev. Dr. Prescot.”  God knows whether he is a clergyman or a doctor, and perhaps I may have betrayed my forgetfulness; but I -thought it was best to err on the over civil side.  Tell me something about him; I dread his Discourses.  Is he the strange man that a few years ago sent me a volume of an uncommon form, and of more uncommon matter?  I suspect so.(255)

You shall certainly have two or three of my prints by Mr. Essex when he returns hither and hence, and any thing else you will command.  I am just now in great concern for the terrible death of General Conway’s son-in-law, Mr. Damer,(256) of which, perhaps, you in your solitude have not heard.-You are happy who take no part but in the past world, for the mortui non mordent, nor do any of the extravagant and distressing things that perhaps they did in their lives.  I hope the gout, that persecutes even in a hermitage, has left you.  Yours most sincerely.

(255) Dr. Kenrick Prescot, master of Catherine Hall, and author of a quarto volume, published at Cambridge in 1773, entitled, “Letters concerning Homer the Sleeper, in Horace; with additional classic Amusements."-E.