was the late Bolingbroke of impious memory. Let me know when your declamation is over. Pardon an observation on style: yours' is vulgar and I received mercantile : your letter' is the way of writing. Inclose your letters in a cover, it is more polite. LETTER XII. Pay Office, May 20, 1755. MY DEAR NEPHEW, I AM extremely concerned to hear that you have been ill, especially as your account of an illness, you speak of as past, implies such remains of disorder as I beg you will give all proper attention to. By the medicine your physician has ordered, I conceive he considers your case in some degree nervous. If that be so, advise with him whether a little change of air and of the scene, together with some weeks course of steel waters, might not be highly proper for you. I am to go the day after tomorrow to Sunning Hill, in Windsor Forest, where I propose to drink those waters for about a month. Lady Hester and I shall be happy in your company, if your doctor shall be of opinion that such waters may be of service to you; which, I hope, will be his opinion. Besides health recovered, the muses shall not be quite forgot: we will ride, read, walk and philosophize, extremely at our ease, and you may return to Cambridge with new ardour, or at least with strength repaired, when we leave Sunning Hill. If you come, the sooner the better, on all accounts. We propose to go into Buckinghamshire in about a month. I rejoice that your declamation is over, and that you have begun, my dearest nephew, to open your mouth in public, ingenti Patriæ perculsus Amore. I wish I had heard you perform: the only way I ever shall hear your praises from your own mouth. My gout prevented my so much intended and wished for journey to Cambridge and now my plan of drinking waters renders it impossible. Come, then, my dear boy, to us; and so Mahomet and |