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Bury St Edmunds Record Office HD749; published in Wickett, p. 63
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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I received last night a letter from poor sister Bet, which my daughter will copy for you on a following page. It came to me in about 38 days from Alexandria to New York and from thence across the Atlantic to Liverpool and 200 miles into Bedfordshire.
You may wonder, if you do not take her infirmities into
consideration, that she says as little, for I wrote in the latter end of
September, her a very long letter, full of news of all
sorts, and particularly as to family affairs relating to us all; you and your
married Daughters, Brother Nat and
his late troubles, and myself and children, and my progress in poetry (for I am
become almost a professd author) &c &c—
But one great cause for my writing now is, that for about a
fortnight past I have tried to break from my violent dreams in a morning and for myself to believe that my Elder Brother is Living! and
then Isaac comes across
my mind, but though I know him to be dead his image is so fresh in my memory as
yours. It is a strange feeling and I don’t much like it, and I wish particularly
you would let me see your own hand writing, to dispel the illusion, and pull the
wool out of my brain, for I am afraid I have been working too hard lately. I
know very well there are a wife and bairns living in Well Street, but I cannot
find you nor bring you living before
my mind’s eye. But the mind’s eye is sometimes misty—pray write directly. My
health is tolerably firm and steady. Honington I have done with, and it seems effectually to have done
with me, for the Devil a farthing of money can I get in my hour of necessity for
all the horrible expense and cost I have sustain’d.
Writing is to me harder than digging was 40 years ago, but my mind, my power of composition, is as strong and more active than ever it was in my life.