From my den I return you condolence for your decaying sight, not for any thing there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a London newspaper.  The poets are as well to listen to, any thing high may, nay must, be read out—­you read it to yourself with an imaginary auditor—­but the light paragraphs must be glid over by the proper eye, mouthing mumbles their gossamery substance.  ’Tis these trifles I should mourn in fading sight.  A newspaper is the single gleam of comfort I receive here, it comes from rich Cathay with tidings of mankind.  Yet I could not attend to it read out by the most beloved voice.  But your eyes do not get worse, I gather.  O for the collyrium of Tobias inclosed in a whiting’s liver to send you with no apocryphal good wishes!  The last long time I heard from you, you had knock’d your head against something.  Do not do so.  For your head (I do not flatter) is not a nob, or the top of a brass nail, or the end of a nine pin—­unless a Vulcanian hammer could fairly batter a Recluse out of it, then would I bid the smirch’d god knock and knock lustily, the two-handed skinker.  What a nice long letter Dorothy has written!  Mary must squeeze out a line propria manu, but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter writing for a long interval.  ’Twill please you all to hear that, tho’ I fret like a lion in a net, her present health and spirits are better than they have been for some time past:  she is absolutely three years and a half younger, as I tell her, since we have adopted this boarding plan.  Our providers are an honest pair, dame Westwood and her husband—­he, when the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, retired since with something under a competence, writes himself parcel gentleman, hath borne parish offices, sings fine old sea songs at threescore and ten, sighs only now and then when he thinks that he has a son on his hands about 15, whom he finds a difficulty in getting out into the world, and then checks a sigh with muttering, as I once heard him prettily, not meaning to be heard, “I have married my daughter however,”—­takes the weather as it comes, outsides it to town in severest season, and a’ winter nights tells old stories not tending to literature, how comfortable to author-rid folks! and has one anecdote, upon which and about forty pounds a year he seems to have retired in green old age.  It was how he was a rider in his youth, travelling for shops, and once (not to baulk his employer’s bargain) on a sweltering day in August, rode foaming into Dunstable upon a mad horse to the dismay and expostulary wonderment of innkeepers, ostlers &c. who declared they would not have bestrid the beast to win the Darby.  Understand the creature gall’d to death and desperation by gad flies, cormorants winged, worse than beset Inachus’ daughter.  This he tells, this he brindles and burnishes on a’ winter’s eves, ’tis his star of set glory, his rejuvenescence