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to my friends than I am capable of doing at present - but as I have already said I detest unavailing lamentation – This is therefore the last letter in which I intend speaking to you of myself. In future I will tell you what I am reading, & what I have seen, if I have seen any thing, but I feel to have lived during the last three years the life of Mother Goose’s sleeping beauty & to have dozed away all my senses - but I hope to rise from the sea, tho not Venus like M.^rs Keate yet a newborn Minerva & on my return to this Land of Philosophy, to become a philosopher hitherto my natural genius & habits of society have impeded my progress, but I expect in the Cauldron of Medea (as M.^rs Smith calls it) to be regenerated.

At present however I keep to subjects unphilosophical. there was a passage in your last letter but one which I should have replied to when I last wrote had I not been too ill.

Till I recollected that memory is not required from a Poet I felt surprized at your having forgot what I suffered from my Father’s resignation of the Deanery to the death of my Mother, I might say of my Sister, when time & accident began to reconcile me to the loss of my earliest connections I had not therefore an idea when I spoke of 22 years of domestic vexation of your taking the whole upon yourself. I should indeed be