FRIDAY, AUG. 11.


I will send you a large packet, as you desire and expect; since I can do
it by so safe a conveyance: but not all that is come to my hand--for I
must own that my friends are very severe; too severe for any body, who
loves them not, to see their letters. You, my dear, would not call them
my friends, you said, long ago; but my relations: indeed I cannot call
them my relations, I think!----But I am ill; and therefore perhaps more
peevish than I should be. It is difficult to go out of ourselves to give
a judgment against ourselves; and yet, oftentimes, to pass a just
judgment, we ought.

I thought I should alarm you in the choice of my executor. But the sad
necessity I am reduced to must excuse me.

I shall not repeat any thing I have said before on that subject: but if
your objections will not be answered to your satisfaction by the papers
and letters I shall enclose, marked 1, 2, 3, 4, to 9, I must think myself
in another instance unhappy; since I am engaged too far (and with my own
judgment too) to recede.

As Mr. Belford has transcribed for me, in confidence, from his friend's
letters, the passages which accompany this, I must insist that you suffer
no soul but yourself to peruse them; and that you return them by the very
first opportunity; that so no use may be made of them that may do hurt
either to the original writer or to the communicator. You'll observe I
am bound by promise to this care. If through my means any mischief
should arise, between this humane and that inhuman libertine, I should
think myself utterly inexcusable.