If your former letters had required an answer, or if I could have given any useful advice in reply upon the matter to which they related, I certainly should have replied to them, however much I had been engaged at the time. But this not being the case, & thinking it probable your volume

might be inclosed in a parcel from Longmans, which is at this time upon the road, I waited for its arrival, as a more convenient season. It was too late to xxxxxx intreat you (which I should otherwise have done) not to make application to Lord Liverpool, whose answer to any such application I could with certainty have anticipated.

Your publisher seems to have suggested the best plan.

D^r Clar Stanier Clarke however is no longer the Kings Librarian.

Sumner

is his successors name & you had better address it to him, with a note requesting that he will place it in the royal library, as you have no other means of introducing it.

No person would rejoice more than I should do, if your book were to produce consequences as desirable as you have ever even in a dream thought possible. Thirty or forty years ago, it might most probably have done so. The times are very different now. A poet was then as rare a creature as a Bird of Paradise, – they are now as common as starlings. A courteous acknowledgement of your book I doubt not you will receive, I wish I could see a probability of any thing more substantial. Something has been said of an Academy

which would have rewards to bestow, – but I know nothing more of it than what the newspapers informed me, & the scheme seemed to have been formed by persons very little acquainted with the actual state of literature in this country. Nevertheless if it takes effect, I should be very glad that you were to profit by it.

I am sorry my silence should have occasioned you any uneasiness. You would not have wondered at it, if you knew how many & how pressing my employments are, & how much of my time is consumed in answering letters. That it did had not proceeded from any diminution of respect & good will you would ere long have seen. I have am writing a paper for the Q.R.

in which some mention will be made of the Quakers, & I shall not let pass that occasion of mentioning their poet.