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Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. d. 110. Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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I should be sorry my dear Lightfoot were all intercourse between you & I to cease. during two years of my existence, & those not the most unimportant, I cannot look back upon myself without remembring you. my intercourse with most men has been embittered by their follies or their faults, from you I recollect only acts of kindliness, during the whole of our intimacy. one & he the best of us, is in a better world, methinks the common friendship of poor Edmund Seward is a tie which should not be broken. I have a silver pencil from his brother for you, which he desired me to keep till an opportunity of sending it offered. were I within fifty miles of you I would bring it myself.
I am here for a short <time> only with my Mother. my place of abode is London, but as I live in lodgings there I can give you no direction. I have been a member of Greys Inn for twelve-months, shall go to a Special Pleaders Office after Christmas, & probably enter into that lines of business for myself the following year. — add to this that I & Edith are as well & as happy as you could wish us, (save only that I have no children) & you know all that concerns me. I have no wants for the present, no fears for the future. had a country life fallen to my lot I should have liked it better, but of the circumstances that make up comfort place is the least important — & I shall always be able to escape to green fields during the long vacation.
You will be pleased to hear that George Burnett is comfortably settled as minister to an Unitarian congregation at Yarmouth in Norfolk. he was to have passed some weeks with us in Hampshire (where we spent the summer in an out-of-the-way village near the sea) but the congregation invited him there, so that it is now fourteen months since we have seen each other. I hear from him frequently. every body loves him. he is the same as you knew him, but you will allow one who is an Unitarian himself, to say that George has theological learning enough to puzzle the whole bench of bishops.
Douglas
The little volume of Poems which I printed last winter sold rapidly. the edition of 500 went in three months, & a second is published.
I had a brother in Kingsbridge some four months ago almost pennyless, turned adrift from a French prison, with his bed & baggage to join his ship how he could. I wished he had known you when I heard of this. [MS torn] came from the shore to Kingsbridge, & among them just [MS torn] enough to reach Plymouth.
Let me hear from you. [MS torn] remain here till the 17th of November. a letter to Mr Cottle Bookseller Bristol will always reach me, & I shall always be glad to hear of you — still more glad to see you if you can ever come to London.