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BL Add. MS 28268, ff. 55–56; extract published in Hart, p. 11
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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I hope you will not be gone before you have this. I know not how
to apologize for not writing before. Yesterday the damn’d creaking of the door
almost harrow’d my soul to rags. Every noise was a dagger in my ears. I tried to
sooth my pain with poetry, to exert myself forcibly, and to conquer by a coup de
main, the imaginary evils that beset me, for imaginary they certainly were in a
great degree. I think a man really mad is far happier than one who has this
dastardly sinking of the soul, and retains his reason seemingly for no other
purpose than to prove its weakness. I had been made most outrageously angry the
day before; and, on Sunday last, some verses of Nat’s about my parents and the
enclosing of Honington Green, had
melted me into salt water, and opened every latent weakness of my heart to a
very uncommon degree.
I now take the first measure that suggests itself to help you. I write to Mr C Bloomfield and offer bond and payment in six months for 40 or £50 from him or any one at Bury who may do you the favour. If Mr B do not do it, use my name and promise it to any one else. Dun any of your customers till I can have inteligence, and try some other means if this should fail.
— I have oil’d the hinges of the door. To hear that you
can get along will be oil to my own hinges. I have been composing a ‘Ditty
for a Highland Drover returning from England,’ but have not patience to copy
it now, it compleats the coming Vollm, but the winter Song shall stand
last.
My head swims a little. I must take a turn amongst the brickfields and snuff up the smoke; and, perhaps tomorrow shall feel the return of my usual spirits, or more. O Lord! what a poor creature is Man! and of Men what a poor creature is a Bloomfield!!