You were pleased to promise me that when the great Voyage should be published, you would send it to me. I am now at Pembroke College, Oxford, and if you can conveniently enclose it in a parcel, or send it any other way, I shall think the perusal of it a great favour.
I am,
Sir
Your most humble servant
Sam Johnson
June 8 1784
Curiously enough, one of the last subjects upon which Johnson concentrated his waning energies in 1783-84 was that of the possibilities of the balloon, which he persistently called "ballon."[52]
For some years I have been an assiduous collector of the letters and MSS. of George Crabbe. I now possess his two historic letters to Edmund Burke. It was in the earliest of these (once the property of Sir Theodore Martin) that he made his despairing appeal for pecuniary aid to save him from suicide or starvation. Fifty-one years later, George Crabbe, Rector of Trowbridge, lay a-dying. He receives in his sick-chamber the following letter from John Forster:—
John Forster to George Crabbe.
[Letter franked by Edward Lytton Bulwer.]
4 Burton St.
Burton Crescent, London
Jany 20 '32
Revd. Sir,—I beg, very respectfully to submit to your inspection the enclosed paper.[53] May I venture to hope that your sympathy with the cause of the world of letters—independently of considerations unfortunately still more urgent, will induce you to lend the favour of your distinguished name to a project now become necessary to rescue Mr. Leigh Hunt from a hard crisis in his fortune