“You write most excellent epistles—­a fig for other correspondents, with their nonsensical apologies for ’knowing nought about it,’—­you send me a delightful budget.  I am here in a perpetual vortex of dissipation (very pleasant for all that), and, strange to tell, I get thinner, being now below eleven stone considerably.  Stay in town a month, perhaps six weeks, trip into Essex, and then, as a favour, irradiate Southwell for three days with the light of my countenance; but nothing shall ever make me reside there again.  I positively return to Cambridge in October; we are to be uncommonly gay, or in truth I should cut the University.  An extraordinary circumstance occurred to me at Cambridge; a girl so very like ——­ made her appearance, that nothing but the most minute inspection could have undeceived me.  I wish I had asked if she had ever been at H——.

“What the devil would Ridge have? is not fifty in a fortnight, before the advertisements, a sufficient sale?  I hear many of the London booksellers have them, and Crosby has sent copies to the principal watering places.  Are they liked or not in Southwell?...  I wish Boatswain had swallowed Damon!  How is Bran? by the immortal gods, Bran ought to be a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.

“The intelligence of London cannot be interesting to you, who have rusticated all your life—­the annals of routs, riots, balls and boxing-matches, cards and crim. cons., parliamentary discussion, political details, masquerades, mechanics, Argyle Street Institution and aquatic races, love and lotteries, Brookes’s and Buonaparte, opera-singers and oratorios, wine, women, wax-work, and weather-cocks, can’t accord with your insulated ideas of decorum and other silly expressions not inserted in our vocabulary.

“Oh!  Southwell, Southwell, how I rejoice to have left thee, and how I curse the heavy hours I dragged along, for so many months, among the Mohawks who inhabit your kraals!—­However, one thing I do not regret, which is having pared off a sufficient quantity of flesh to enable me to slip into ‘an eel skin,’ and vie with the slim beaux of modern times; though I am sorry to say, it seems to be the mode amongst gentlemen to grow fat, and I am told I am at least fourteen pound below the fashion.  However, I decrease instead of enlarging, which is extraordinary, as violent exercise in London is impracticable; but I attribute the phenomenon to our evening squeezes at public and private parties.  I heard from Ridge this morning (the 14th, my letter was begun yesterday):  he says the poems go on as well as can be wished; the seventy-five sent to town are circulated, and a demand for fifty more complied with, the day he dated his epistle, though the advertisements are not yet half published.  Adieu.