When you said that you feared that your particular account of your very providential escape would deter me from writing to you again, I am sure, dear Sir, that you spoke only from modesty, and not from thinking me capable of being so criminally indifferent to any thing, much less under such danger as you have run, that regards so old a friend, and one to whom I owe so many obligations.  I am but too apt to write letters on trifling or no occasion’s:  and should certainly have told you the interest I take in your accident, and how happy I am that it had no consequences of any sort.  It is hard that temperance itself, which you are, should be punished for a good-natured transgression of your own rules, and where the excess was only staying out beyond your usual hour.  I am heartily glad you did not jump out of your chaise; it has often been a much worse precaution than any consequences from risking to remain in it; as you are lame too, might have been very fatal.  Thank God! all ended so well.  Mr. Masters seems to have been more frightened, with not greater reason.  What an absurd man to be impatient to notify a disagreeable event to you, and in so boisterous a manner, and which he could not know was true, since it was not!

I shall take extremely kind your sending me your picture in glass.  I have carefully preserved the slight outline of yourself in a gown and nightcap, which you once was’ so good as to give me, because there was some likeness to your features. though it is too old even now.  For a portrait of me in return you might have it by sending the painter to the anatomical school, and bidding him draw the first skeleton he sees.  I should expect any limner would laugh in my face if I offered it to him to be copied.

I thought I had confounded the ancient count-bishops, as I had, and you have set me right.  The new temporal-ecclesiastical peers estate is more than twelve thousand a Year, though I can scarce believe it is eighteen, as the last lord said.

The picture found near the altar in Westminster-Abbey, about three years ago, was of King Sebert; I saw it, and it was well preserved, with some others worse—­but they have foolishly buried it again behind their new altar-piece; and so they have a very fine tomb of Ann of Cleve, close to the altar, which they did not know till I told them whose it was, though her arms are upon it, and though there is an exact plate of it in Sandford.  They might at least have cut out the portraits, and removed them to a conspicuous situation; but though this age is grown so antiquarian, it has not gained a grain more of sense in that walk—­witness as you instance in Mr. Grose’s Legends, and in the dean and chapter reburying the crown, robes, and sceptre of Edward I.—­there would surely have been as much piety in preserving them in their treasury, as in consigning them again to decay.  I did not know that the salvation of robes and crowns depended on receiving Christian burial.  At the same time, the chapter transgress that prince’s will, like all their antecessors; for he ordered his tomb to be opened every year or two years, and receive a new cerecloth or pall; but they boast now of having enclosed him so substantially that his ashes cannot be violated again.