MY DEAR FRIEND: I have been in your debt some time, which, you know, I am not very apt to be: but it was really for want of specie to pay. The present state of my invention does not enable me to coin; and you would have had as little pleasure in reading, as I should have in writing ‘le coglionerie’ of this place; besides, that I am very little mingled in them. I do not know whether I shall be able to follow, your advice, and cut a winner; for, at present, I have neither won nor lost a single shilling. I will play on this week only; and if I have a good run, I will carry it off with me; if a bad one, the loss can hardly amount to anything considerable in seven days, for I hope to see you in town to-morrow sevennight.
I had a dismal letter from Harte, last week; he tells me that he is at nurse with a sister in Berkshire; that he has got a confirmed jaundice, besides twenty other distempers. The true cause of these complaints I take to be the same that so greatly disordered, and had nearly destroyed the most august House of Austria, about one hundred and thirty years ago; I mean Gustavus Adolphus; who neither answered his expectations in point of profit nor reputation, and that merely by his own fault, in not writing it in the vulgar tongue; for as to facts I will maintain that it is one of the best histories extant.
‘Au revoir’, as Sir Fopling says, and God bless you!
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