'TO MR. JOSEPH BARETTI, AT MILAN.

'London, July 20, 1762.

'SIR, However justly you may accuse me for want of punctuality in
correspondence, I am not so far lost in negligence as to omit the
opportunity of writing to you, which Mr. Beauclerk's passage through
Milan affords me.

'I suppose you received the Idlers, and I intend that you shall soon
receive Shakspeare, that you may explain his works to the ladies of
Italy, and tell them the story of the editor, among the other strange
narratives with which your long residence in this unknown region has
supplied you.

'As you have now been long away, I suppose your curiosity may pant for
some news of your old friends. Miss Williams and I live much as we did.
Miss Cotterel still continues to cling to Mrs. Porter, and Charlotte
is now big of the fourth child. Mr. Reynolds gets six thousands a year.
Levet is lately married, not without much suspicion that he has been
wretchedly cheated in his match. Mr. Chambers is gone this day, for the
first time, the circuit with the Judges. Mr. Richardson is dead of an
apoplexy, and his second daughter has married a merchant.

'My vanity, or my kindness, makes me flatter myself, that you would
rather hear of me than of those whom I have mentioned; but of myself
I have very little which I care to tell. Last winter I went down to my
native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than
I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I