I
"Woodbridge, Suffolk, Apl. 14th, 1814.
"
My Lord
,—I received this morning the reply with which your Lordship honour'd my last, and now avail myself of the permission you have so kindly granted to state as briefly as I can the circumstances which have induced me to make this application, and the extent of my wishes respecting your Lordship's interference.
"Eight years since, I went into business in this place as a Merchant. I was then just of age, and, shortly after, married. The business in which I was engaged was of a very precarious Nature; and after vainly trying for 4 Years to make the best of it, I was compell'd to relinquish it altogether. Just then, to add to my distress, I lost my best, my firmest, my tenderest friend—the only being for whose sake I ever desir'd wealth, and the only one who could have cheer'd the gloom of Poverty. My Capital being a borrow'd one, I returned it as far as I could to the person who had lent it. Since that time, my Lord, I have been struggling to make the best of a Clerkship of £80 per ann., out of which I have to meet every expence, and still to maintain a respectable appearance in a Place where I have resided under different circumstances. Had I enter'd my present Situation free of all debts, I should have made it an inviolable rule to have limited my expenditure to my Income; but beginning in debt, compell'd by peculiar circumstances to mix with those much superior to myself, I have gone on till I find it quite impossible to go on any longer, and I am compelled to seek for some asylum where, by rigid frugality and indefatigable exertion, I may free myself from my present humiliating embarrassments; but while I am here the thing seems impracticable. Your Lordship will naturally inquire why I do not avail myself of the influence of those friends by whom I am known. As you have, my Lord, done me the honour to encourage me to state my position frankly, I will, without hesitation, inform you. I am, nominally at least, a Quaker. The persons to whom I should, in my present difficulties, naturally look for assistance are among the most respectable of that body; but my attachments to literary and metaphysical studies, and a line of conduct not compatible with the strictness of Quaker discipline, have, I am afraid, brought me into disrepute with those to whom I should otherwise have confided my situation. Were I to disclose it, it would only be consider'd as a fit judgment on me for my scepticism and infidelity.
"This, my Lord, is a brief but faithful statement of my present situation; it is, as I before told your Lordship, in every respect an untenable one. I must relinquish it, and throw myself an outcast on society.
Can you, will you
, my Lord, exert