After having been silent longer perhaps than I ought to have been, suffering post after post to slide away with a firm resolution to write the very next (and what is one day's difference?), I am now as usual driven to the sound of the bell and the verge of eleven. Will you for once accept as a letter the information that I am perfectly well, and that I only wish you as happily settled in a house at Bath as I am in London? Holroyd admires Brook Street, but not the side where his father lives.[184] The opposite side has a fine prospect from the back rooms.
Adieu! Dear Madam, and either in long or short letters, believe me,
[184] Isaac Holroyd, who, by his wife, Dorothy Baker, was the father of John Baker Holroyd, lived at Bath, where he died in May, 1778. With him lived his only surviving daughter, Sarah Martha Holroyd, who died unmarried, some years later, at Bath. She translated, says Miss Burney, from the French version a German work, in four thick volumes--Sturm's _Religious Meditations and Observations for every Day in the Year_. Both Mr. and Miss Holroyd are frequently mentioned in the letters.
You are clearly in the right. If seldom, long letters: if short ones, often. 'Tis perfectly equitable, but now to my old reasons there is a new one added,--this abominable fine weather which will not allow me a quiet hour at home, without being liable to the reproaches of my friends and of my own conscience. It is the more provoking as it drives me not out of a stinking Apothecary's, but from my own new clean comfortable dear house, which I like better every week I pass in it. I now live, which I never did before, and if it would but rain, should enjoy that unity of study and society, in which I have always placed my prospect of happiness. Though I do not find my expences rise higher than I calculated that they would, I have not yet practised much of that Economy with which the voice of Fame has complimented me: but at least I keep (in general) better hours than I ever yet could bring about in London.
With regard to the Cornish journey. I will fairly lay before you the state of my mind. As we are often tempted to sacrifice propriety to inclination, I am afraid that I should have deferred it another summer in favour of Derbyshire. Your company has fixed me, but I thought when you was in town we had settled it for the autumn. If you wish to be early in your visit, I will calculate that the Autumn begins with August, and will then attend you at Bath, or if you chuse to go _still_ earlier, I will bring you back; for I fancy my stay at Port Eliott will hardly be so long as yours. I hear nothing of the Lord of it, but I know that the _copper_ Lockwood impatiently expect him in town.