Mr. and Mrs. Seward will accept my most affectionate respects. My male friend at Lichfield will join in your conversation on the Andrés. Among the numerous good qualities he is possessed of, he certainly has gratitude, and then he can not forget those who so sincerely love and esteem him. I, in particular, shall always recall with pleasure the happy hours I have passed in his company. My friendship for him, and for your family, has diffused itself, like the precious ointment from Aaron's beard, on everything which surrounds you; therefore I beg you would give my amities to the whole town. Persuade Honora to forgive the length and ardor of the enclosed, and believe me truly,
Your affectionate and faithful friend,
J. André.
LETTER II.
London, October 19, 1769.
From the midst of books, papers, bills, and other implements of gain, let me lift up my drowsy head awhile to converse with dear Julia. And first, as I know she has a fervent wish to see me a quill-driver, I must tell her that I begin, as people are wont to do, to look upon my future profession with great partiality. I no longer see it in so disadvantageous a light. Instead of figuring a merchant as a middle-aged man, with a bob-wig, a rough beard, in snuff-colored clothes, grasping a guinea in his red hand, I conceive a comely young man, with a tolerable pig-tail, wielding a pen with all the noble fierceness of the Duke of Marlborough brandishing a truncheon upon a sign-post, surrounded with types and emblems, and canopied with cornucopias that disembogue their stores upon his head; Mercuries reclined upon bales of goods; Genii playing with pens, ink, and paper; while in perspective, his gorgeous vessels, "launched on the bosom of the silver Thames," are wafting to distant lands the produce of this commercial nation. Thus all the mercantile glories crowd on my fancy, emblazoned in the most refulgent coloring of an ardent imagination. Borne on her soaring pinions, I wing my flight to the time when Heaven shall have crowned my labors with success and opulence. I see sumptuous palaces rising to receive me. I see orphans, and widows, and painters, and fiddlers, and poets, and builders, protected and encouraged; and when the fabric is pretty nearly finished by my shattered pericranium, I cast my eyes around and find John André by a small coal-fire, in a gloomy compting-house in Warnford Court, nothing so little as what he has been making himself, and in all probability never to be much more than he is at present. But oh, my dear Honora! it is for thy sake only I wish for wealth. You say she was somewhat better at the time you wrote last. I must flatter myself that she will soon be without any remains of this threatening disease.
It is seven o'clock. You and Honora, with two or three more select friends, are now probably encircling your dressing-room fireplace. What would I not give to enlarge that circle! The idea of a clean hearth, and a snug circle round it, formed by a few sincere friends, transports me. You seem combined together against the inclemency of the weather, the hurry, bustle, ceremony, censoriousness, and envy of the world. The purity, the warmth, the kindly influence of fire, to all for whom it is kindled, is a good emblem of the friendship of such amiable minds as Julia's and her Honora's. Since I can not be there in reality, pray imagine me with you; admit me to your conversaziones; think how I wish for the blessing of joining them!—and be persuaded that I take part in all your pleasures, in the dear hope that e'er it be very long your blazing hearth will burn again for me. Pray keep me a place; let the poker, tongs, or shovel, represent me; but you have Dutch tiles, which are infinitely better; so let Moses, or Aaron, or Balaam's ass, be my representative.
But time calls me to Clapton. I quit you abruptly till to-morrow, when, if I do not tear the nonsense I have been writing, I may perhaps increase its quantity. Signora Cynthia is in clouded majesty. Silvered with her beams, I am about to jog to Clapton upon my own stumps; musing as I homeward plod my way—ah! need I name the subject of my contemplations?
Thursday.