I shall always be glad to hear of so kind a friend; but hope you will pardon me, if, amidst my various engagements, I prove, as I do to the best friends I have in the world, a very bad correspondent.

1794, May.

'P. D.

LXXXIV. Letters from Doctors Hildesley, Hales, Leland, and Mr. Samuel Richardson.

MR. URBAN,

Chelsea, June 30. THE ready attention with which you inserted in your Magazine Dr. Doddridge's letter to Dr. Hildesley, is not unnoticed. My friend Mr. Giberne, no less than myself, feels encouraged to add the following, which he reserved from amidst many others; and to see them in the list of your permanent publication will be a circumstance of satisfaction to us both:

To collect a set of medals, or of ancient portraits, has, at times, been the eager pursuit of ingenious and good men. What I now forward to you are not unworthy of the like regard; and to class on the same line a Hildesley, a Richardson, a Hales, and a Leland, is to form a constellation of no ordinary lustre. They were all of the benign aspect; they did not live in vain; they speak forcibly, and from the heart; and thus once more exhibit a proof of the old and animating adage:

Great souls by instinct to each other turn,
Demand alliance, and in friendship burn.

The good bishop's two letters, and the narrative of his last illness and decease, seemed too interesting to be omitted. Such of these papers as you prefer, or all of them, if approved, are at your service. They are genuine: the originals are here inclosed for your inspection; and I give them to your readers, that, like my relation and myself, they may be at once amused and advantaged.

Yours,

WM. BUTLER.

LETTER I.

Dr. Hildesley to the Miss Ithells.

Hitchin, 13 Dec. 1754.

NOTHING could excuse the liberty I take of intruding a book upon the ladies at the Temple-who, I doubt not, are amply furnished with choice of the best of every kindbut my thorough persuasion, that what I here presume to recommend to their perusal will be quite acceptable to them.

If this be looked upon as a compliment, I can only say, it is a just one. It is too sure, that, in this age of variety of self-flying engagements, there are not many to be found who have a relish for such sublime and spiritual enjoyments as these "Meditations" are capable of affording. It gives me great pleasure to think how much you will both rejoice in them; and how ready you will be to say, with Dr. Young, and some others who admire them, that "they should never be far out of our reach."

Were this world and its contents designed for our chief end and happiness, right it might seem to be as anxious, and solicitous, and eager, as we see the generality of its votaries are, to obtain and pursue the gratifications peculiar to our animal frame and mortal condition. But, if our true and permanent felicity is to be had and sought elsewhere, namely, in a state as different as earth is from heaven, and time from eternity; if the close of a few more revolutions of the same sort of unsatisfying days, months, and years, we have already past, will instantly convince us of this difference, when it will avail us little to remember what degree or station of life we have filled here, but what we have known, and done, of the will of him that placed us in it; [then] from these considerations we are naturally led to think, farther, that, as sure as God is a spirit, the joys of heaven must be spiritual; that even our bodies, with which we are to arise, are to be spiritualised,--for, flesh and blood cannot inherit, cannot partake, or have any sense of, the delights of the kingdom purchased by the blood of

Christ.

What, then, must needs be the truest wisdom of a rational thinking creature, but to provide in earnest for this certain inevitable change! that it may be, with all advantage, to eternity? But alas! how few are there so wise

and so thinking! If those I am now writing to are,-as I conceive they are,-of the number of the few, I have my end in, and shall need no apology, for this address. My incapacity, which has of late increased, of being so useful to, and conversant with, the family I the most revere of any under my charge, has been one inducement to this unusual manner of application to them, of which I promise myself their candid and favourable acceptance; and subscribe, with my earnest prayers for their improvement and perseverance in whatever may tend to their everlasting welfare, Mr. and the Miss Ithell's sincerely obedient and obliged humble servant,

M. HILDESLEY.

*The above letter, or perhaps the unknown volume referred to, is thus superscribed:

Mr. S. Richardson, author of Clarissa, Grandison, and Pamela, to a Lady.

MADAM,

London, Jan. 10, 1757.

I AM very sorry that the bishop says "He dare not call me his friend." No one living could value the good Vicar of Hitchin more than I did, for the sake of his character, before I had the pleasure of being visited by him as Bishop of Man; and most heartily I congratulated in my mind the people committed to his charge, on their happiness not suffering by their change.

To myself, in the letters he favoured me with, I always thought him too condescending, too humble; and is he not

so, in the notice he takes of me in the paper before me? I thought myself very happy in meeting, at the same inn at Barnet, the good Mr. Hildesley, on his return from Kent. Dr. Young dined with me there; and it was with regret that I could not engage him to do so too: but he had too good reasons to deny me that pleasure. My business lay always heavy upon me. I never, in two or three years could make a visit to Dr. Young of more than three or four days, out and in; but, had I known that the good Vicar of Hitchin had formed but half a wish to see me there, I would have got Dr. Young (both gentlemen respecting each other greatly) to have shewed me the way.

I had the favour of a visit, at my house in town, from his lordship; and, meeting him afterwards in the street, I knew that he was in town 'preparing for his diocese; and if I forget not, I was led to hope for another visit before his departure. But little did I know that his lordship was six whole weeks in town, while my business led me so near him; if I had, I should have held myself inexcusable not to have paid my duty to him in all that time,

I have a very sincere respect for this worthy prelate. He has an amiable aspect, and a chearfulness in his manner that seemed to me an assurance that all was right within. [ had interested myself in his welfare, and should have rejoiced in an account of it, in his new settlement. His lordship is very good to me, in his kind promise not to free me, in future, occasionally, from what he calls his intrusions. He has not, any where, a more sincere well-wisher. I should take it for a favour to be considered by so worthy a divine as more than an acquaintance.

Many happy returns of the season attend your ladyship, and all you love, prays, madam, your most faithful and obliged servant,

S. RICHARDSON.

LETTER III.

Dr. Stephen Hales* to Bishop Hildesley.

MY GOOD LORD,

Teddington, May 16, 1758.

I AM much obliged to you for your kind letter of April 11,

"Blest with se

Written at fourscore! in a clear, but striking hand. renity of mind, and an excellent constitution, he attained to the age of 84 years, and died, after a short illness, Jan. 4, 1761." See Biogr. Dict. in 12 vols. 8vo.

and for the favourable reception of my book; in which I hope there are many things of so great benefit to mankind as will hereafter have a considerable influence on the affairs of the world for the better, especially in relation to those mighty destroyers, drams; and that, not only of the lives, but also of the morals of mankind. With a view to which I have sent sixteen of this book, with its first part, to several nations of Europe, especially the more northern, as far as to Petersburg; and am just going to reprint the first part, so much abbreviated as to bind up well with the second part in one six-shilling book; principally with a view to send two or three hundred of them, at the first opportunities, to all our colonies in America, from the southern to the most northern.

As the late occasional partial restraint took its rise from the great scarcity of corn, I cannot forbear looking upon it as a great blessing from him who in the midst of judgment remembers mercy; for, the happy event has been the almost half curing of the unhappy drammists. The reason why self-abuse of every kind seems to be paramount to the power of human laws is, that we have lost all discipline in church and state, as the late excellent Bishop of London observed in his last charge to us clergy in St. Martin's church; whence he inferred, that the parochial clergy ought therefore to exert themselves with the more zeal in their parochial duties.

As to your observation, that I have lived to eighty, without drams, it puts me in mind of an observation of the late Bishop Berkeley, viz. that "there was, in every district, a tough drammist, who was the devil's decoy, to draw others in."

Upon the whole, the open public testimony that I have for thirty years past borne against drams, in eleven different books or newspapers, has been matter of greater satisfaction to me than if I were assured, that the means I have proposed to avoid noxious air should occasion the prolonging the health and lives of an hundred millions of persons.

I have here inclosed a very useful receipt for making yeast, which Mr. Pringle, surgeon to the first regiment of Guards, gave me, which I published in the newspapers the beginning of last March, and which is probably in the Magazines, where I guess you may have seen it. But, for greater certainty, I send it, and, with it, what I did not see till I was cutting the receipt out of Lloyd's Chronicle, viz. the query, "Whether it be right for truly serious persons to visit on Sundays?"