y as I could remember it. The gloss which your sister,
or you, have put upon it does not strike me as correct. Carlisle drew no
inference from it against the honesty of the Quakers, but only in favour
of their surprising coolness--that they should be capable of committing
a good joke, with an utter insensibility to its being any jest at all. I
have reason to believe in the truth of it, because, as I have said, I
heard him repeat it without variation at such an interval. The story
loses sadly in print, for Carlisle is the best story teller I ever
heard. The idea of the discovery of roasting pigs, I also borrowed, from
my friend Manning, and am willing to confess both my plagiarisms.

Should fate ever so order it that you shall be in town with your sister,
mine bids me say that she shall have great pleasure in being introduced
to her. I think I must give up the cause of the Bank--from nine to nine
is galley-slavery, but I hope it is but temporary. Your endeavour at
explaining Fox's insight into the natures of animals must fail, as I
shall transcribe the passage. It appears to me that he stopt short in
time, and was on the brink of falling with his friend Naylor, my
favourite.--The book shall be forthcoming whenever your friend can make
convenient to call for it.

They have dragged me again into the Magazine, but I feel the spirit of
the thing in my own mind quite gone. "Some brains" (I think Ben Jonson
says it) "will endure but one skimming." We are about to have an
inundation of poetry from the Lakes, Wordsworth and Southey are coming
up strong from the North. The she Coleridges have taken flight, to my
regret. With Sara's own-made acquisitions, her unaffectedness and
no-pretensions are beautiful. You might pass an age with her without
suspecting that she knew any thing but her mother's tongue. I don't mean
any reflection on Mrs. Coleridge here. I had better have said her
vernacular idiom. Poor C. I wish he had a home to receive his daughter
in. But he is but as a stranger or a visitor in this world. How did you
like Hartley's sonnets? The first, at least, is vastly fine. Lloyd has
been in town a day or two on business, and is perfectly well. I am
ashamed of the shabby letters I send, but I am by nature anything but
neat. Therein my mother bore me no Quaker. I never could seal a letter
without dropping the wax on one side, besides scalding my fingers. I
never had a seal too of my own. Writing to a great man lately, who i