I love and honour you, Poole, for many things--scarcely for anything more than that, trusting firmly in the rectitude and simplicity of your own heart, and listening with faith to its revealing voice, you never suffered either my subtlety, or my eloquence, to proselytize you to the pernicious doctrine of Necessity.[4] All praise to the Great Being who has graciously enabled me to find my way out of that labyrinth-den of sophistry, and, I would fain believe, to bring with me a better clue than has hitherto been known, to enable others to do the same. I have convinced Southey and Wordsworth; and W., as you know, was, even to extravagance, a Necessitarian. Southey never believed and abhorred the Doctrine, yet thought the argument for it unanswerable by human reason. I have convinced both of them of the sophistry of the argument, and wherein the sophism consists, viz., that all have hitherto--both the Necessitarians and their antagonists--confounded two essentially different things under one name, and in consequence of _this_ mistake, the victory has been always hollow, in favor of the Necessitarians.
P. S. If any letter come to your lodgings for me, of course you will take care of it.
MY DEAREST POOLE,--I have called on Sir James Mackintosh,[5] who offered me his endeavours to procure me a place under him in India, of which endeavour he would not for a moment doubt the success; and assured me _on his Honour, on his Soul_!! (N. B. _his_ Honour!!) (N. B. _his_ Soul!!) that he was sincere. Lillibullero ahoo! ahoo! ahoo! Good morning, Sir James!
I next called on Davy, who seems more and more determined to mould himself upon the Age, in order to make the Age mould itself upon him. Into this language at least I could have translated his conversation. Oh, it is a dangerous business this bowing of the head in the Temple of Rimmon; and such men I aptly christen _Theo-mammonists_, that is, those who at once worship God and Mammon. However, God grant better things of so noble a work of His! And, as I once before said, may that Serpent, the World, climb around the club which supports him, and be the symbol of healing; even as in Tooke's "Pantheon,"[6] you may see the thing _done_ to your eyes in the picture of Esculapius. Well! now for business. I shall leave the note among the schedules. They will wonder, plain, sober people! what damn'd madcap has got among them; or rather I will put it under the letter just arrived for you, that at least it may perhaps be _under_ the _Rose_.[7]