The works of Mr. Thomas Brown, serious and comical : in prose and verse, with his remains in four volumes compleat; vol. II

Containing LETTERS FROM THE Dead to the Living, And from the Living to the Dead. Together with Dialogues of the D E A D , After the Manner of Lucian.
The Seventh Edition carefully Corrected.
LONDON : Printed by and for Edward Midwinter , at the Looking-Glass on London-Bridge . 1730.
VOLUME the Second.
LONDON : Printed in the Year, 1727.
Of the Second Volume.

A Letter of News from Mr. Joseph Haines, of Merry Memory, to his Friends at Will ’s Coffee-House in Covent-Garden. By Mr. Tho. Brown.
Gentlemen ,
I Had done myself the honour to write to you long ago, but wanted a convenience of sending my letter; for you must not imagine ’tis as easy a matter for us on this side the river Styx , to maintain a correspondence with you in the upper world, as ’tis to send a pacquet from London to Rotterdam , or from Paris to Madrid : But upon the news of a fresh war ready to break out in your part of the world, (which, by the by, makes us keep holy-day here in hell) Pluto having thought fit to dispatch an extraordinary messenger to see how your parliament, upon whose resolutions the fate of Europe seems wholly to depend, will behave themselves in this critical conjuncture. I tipp’d the fellow a George to carry this letter for me, and leave it with the master at Will ’s in his way to Westminster .
I am not insensible, gentlemen, that Homer , Virgil , Dante , Don Quevedo , and many more before me, have given an account of these subterranean dominions, for which reason it may look like affectation or vanity in me to meddle with a subject so often handled; but if new travels into Italy , Spain and Germany , are daily read with approbation, because new matters of enquiry and observation perpetually arise, I don’t see why the present state of the Plutonian kingdoms may not be acceptable, there having been as great changes and alterations in these infernal regions, as in any other part of the universe whatever.