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BL Add. MS 28268, ff. 140–41; published in Hart, p. 36
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish 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.
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It is a matter of the utmost astonishment to me that any man could for a moment trust his reputation in the keeping of a stranger in the manner you propose to do with me!
Granting that you may be right when you call me a
man of honour, you probably mean that I would keep the secret if I
bound myself to do it. But to what man of honour would a sensible stranger offer
the wages of prostitution! Perhaps Sir, you may have written thus merely to try
how far I might be tempted by the prospect of gain to forfeit all pretence to
independance, and to put myself compleatly in the power of an anonymous enemy,
for friendship there can be none in the endeavour to seduce any man from the
paths of truth and principle, whatever may be said in approval of his actions
and excellences, or whatever flattery may be offered to his vanity. I deem
myself entirely justified in this severity, if I am to consider the application
as serious. But if it is to pass as a joke it reminds me of
one much better which took place between Dean Swift and Mr Pope, when the former
offered the latter twenty pounds to change his
Religion!! Whatever may be your views and expectations as to the
property of the worthy Officer you wish to praise in verse, I beg of you to
consider that the celebration of candour, truth, and sincerity in him, would be
an everlasting reproach on yourself who would appear to the world to have paid a
debt of justice to the dead, while your conscience would only have this poor
consolation, that by the bait of wealth you had made another man as great a
Rogue and fool as yourself.
I send back your half of the ten pound note, with feelings that I am sure are very far from a unison with yours, but calculated perhaps to honour either in verse or prose such virtues as you attribute to the Captain. they stand more conspicuous from the striking contrast in which you have placed them with yourself. If you had sent nothing in your letter but the request I would not have troubled you nor myself with this reply to an unknown hand, but the return of your note gives me opportunity to assure you that the offer of Mr. B. C. is not accepted on the part of R. B. only as a novel and strange kind of indignity, to which my situation renders me liable, but which I could wish to prevent the repetition of if it was in my power.