“Your hours are so well employed, I hardly dare offer you this trifle to look over; but then, so well am I acquainted with the sweetness of temper which accompanies your learning, I dare ever assure myself of a pardon.  You have already forgiven me greater impertinencies, and condescended yet further in giving me instructions and bestowing some of your minutes in teaching me.  This surprising humility has all the effect it ought to have on my heart; I am sensible of the gratitude I owe to so much goodness, and how much I am ever bound to be your servant.  Here is the work of one week of my solitude—­by the many faults in it your lordship will easily believe I spent no more time upon it; it was hardly finished when I was obliged to begin my journey, and I had not leisure to write it over again.  You have it here without any corrections, with all its blots and errors:  I endeavoured at no beauty of style, but to keep as literally as I could to the sense of the author.  My only intention in presenting it, is to ask your lordship whether I have understood Epictetus?  The fourth chapter, particularly, I am afraid I have mistaken.  Piety and greatness of soul set you above all misfortunes that can happen to yourself, and the calumnies of false tongues; but that same piety which renders what happens to yourself indifferent to you, yet softens the natural compassion in your temper to the greatest degree of tenderness for the interests of the Church, and the liberty and welfare of your country:  the steps that are now made towards the destruction of both, the apparent danger we are in, the manifest growth of injustice, oppression, and hypocrisy, cannot do otherwise than give your lordship those hours of sorrow, which, did not your fortitude of soul, and reflections from religion and philosophy, shorten, would add to the national misfortunes, by injuring the health of so great a supporter of our sinking liberties.  I ought to ask pardon for this digression; it is more proper for me in this place to say something to excuse an address that looks so very presuming.  My sex is usually forbid studies of this nature, and folly reckoned so much our proper sphere, we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to reading or good sense.  We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weakening and effeminating of the mind.  Our natural defects are every way indulged, and it is looked upon as in a degree criminal to improve our reason, or fancy we have any.  We are taught to place all our art in adorning our outward forms, and permitted, without reproach, to carry that custom even to extravagancy, while our minds are entirely neglected, and, by disuse of reflections, filled with nothing but the trifling objects our eyes are daily entertained with.  This custom, so long established and industriously upheld, makes it even ridiculous to go out of the common road, and forces one to find as many excuses, as if it were a thing altogether criminal not to play the fool in