temper which accompanies your learning, I dare ever assure myself of a
pardon. You have already forgiven me greater impertinencies, and
condescended yet further in giving me instructions and bestowing some of
your minutes in teaching me. This surprising humility has all the effect
it ought to have on my heart; I am sensible of the gratitude I owe to so
much goodness, and how much I am ever bound to be your servant. Here is
the work of one week of my solitude--by the many faults in it your
lordship will easily believe I spent no more time upon it; it was hardly
finished when I was obliged to begin my journey, and I had not leisure
to write it over again. You have it here without any corrections, with
all its blots and errors: I endeavoured at no beauty of style, but to
keep as literally as I could to the sense of the author. My only
intention in presenting it, is to ask your lordship whether I have
understood Epictetus? The fourth chapter, particularly, I am afraid I
have mistaken. Piety and greatness of soul set you above all misfortunes
that can happen to yourself, and the calumnies of false tongues; but
that same piety which renders what happens to yourself indifferent to
you, yet softens the natural compassion in your temper to the greatest
degree of tenderness for the interests of the Church, and the liberty
and welfare of your country: the steps that are now made towards the
destruction of both, the apparent danger we are in, the manifest growth
of injustice, oppression, and hypocrisy, cannot do otherwise than give
your lordship those hours of sorrow, which, did not your fortitude of
soul, and reflections from religion and philosophy, shorten, would add
to the national misfortunes, by injuring the health of so great a
supporter of our sinking liberties. I ought to ask pardon for this
digression; it is more proper for me in this place to say something to
excuse an address that looks so very presuming. My sex is usually forbid
studies of this nature, and folly reckoned so much our proper sphere, we
are sooner pardoned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to