firmed, as
they certainly are in a very striking manner, by the philosophical
soldier's details of the structure of society in that remote region of
the East.

TO CAPTAIN ROBERT SCOTT, ROSEBANK, KELSO.

EDINBURGH, September 30, 1790.

DEAR UNCLE,--We arrived here without any accident about five
o'clock on Monday evening. The good weather made our journey
pleasant. I have been attending to your commissions here, and
find that the last volume of Dodsley's Annual Register published
is that for 1787, which I was about to send you; but the
bookseller I {p.155} frequent had not one in boards, though he
expects to procure one for me. There is a new work of the same
title and size, on the same plan, which, being published every
year regularly, has almost cut out Dodsley's, so that this last
is expected to stop altogether. You will let me know if you would
wish to have the new work, which is a good one, will join very
well with those volumes of Dodsley's which you already have, and
is published up to the present year. Byron's Narrative is not yet
published, but you shall have it whenever it comes out.

Agreeable to your permission, I send you the scroll copy of an
essay on the origin of the feudal system, written for the
Literary Society last year. As you are kind enough to interest
yourself in my style and manner of writing, I thought you might
like better to see it in its original state, than one on the
polishing of which more time had been bestowed. You will see that
the intention and attempt of the essay is principally to
controvert two propositions laid down by the writers on the
subject:--1st, That the system was invented by the Lombards; and,
2dly, that its foundation depended on the king's being
acknowledged the sole lord of all the lands in the country, which
he afterwards distributed to be held by military tenures. I have
endeavored to assign it a more general origin, and to prove that
it proceeds upon principles common to all nations when placed in
a certain situation. I am afraid the matter will but poorly
reward the trouble you will find in reading some parts. I hope,
however, you will make out enough to enable you to favor me with
your sentiments upon its faults. There is none whose advice I
prize so hig