"My dear Drury,
"After two years' absence (on the 2d) and some odd days, I am approaching your country. The day of our arrival you will see by the outside date of my letter. At present, we are becalmed comfortably, close to Brest Harbour;—I have never been so near it since I left Duck Puddle. We left Malta thirty-four days ago, and have had a tedious passage of it. You will either see or hear from or of me, soon after the receipt of this, as I pass through town to repair my irreparable affairs; and thence I want to go to Notts. and raise rents, and to Lanes. and sell collieries, and back to London and pay debts,—for it seems I shall neither have coals nor comfort till I go down to Rochdale in person.
"I have brought home some marbles for Hobhouse;—for myself, four ancient Athenian skulls,[141] dug out of sarcophagi—a phial of Attic hemlock[142]—four live tortoises—a greyhound (died on the passage)—two live Greek servants, one an Athenian, t'other a Yaniote, who can speak nothing but Romaic and Italian—and myself, as Moses in the Vicar of Wakefield says, slily, and I may say it too, for I have as little cause to boast of my expedition as he had of his to the fair.
"I wrote to you from the Cyanean Rocks to tell you I had swam from Sestos to Abydos—have you received my letter? Hodgson I suppose is four deep by this time. What would he have given to have seen, like me, the real Parnassus, where I robbed the Bishop of Chrissæ of a book of geography!—but this I only call plagiarism, as it was done within an hour's ride of Delphi."
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Published in two volumes, 4to.
[2] It is almost unnecessary to apprise the reader that the paragraph at the bottom of p. 222. vol. iv. was written before the appearance of this extraordinary paper.