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(Dated Saturday. Probably written about the same time as O.13.1, No. 111.)

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Saturday.

My Dear Sir!

Your letter is manly & friendly, like yourself. I take your confidence as a high compliment, & I trust you consider’d my application in some such way. I must do the best I can; but we will never talk of so unpleasant a subject, about w[hic]h I thank you as much as if you c[oul]d have serv’d me. Your heart w[oul]d bleed for me, did you know my situation & how I have been us’d. The man I paint at the end of my Poem was (God knows!) an example of happiness, compar’d with me. But, never mind.

I will come & sit with you, & be apparently as merry as usual, any evening you send me word you are at leisure after so long absence; & I will always be,

My Dear Sir,
your grateful & affect[iona]te friend
H[erber]t Croft.

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Letters omitted from words abbreviated by superscript letters have been supplied in square brackets.

(Dated Friday. Probably written about the same time as O.13.1, No. 111.)

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Friday morn[in]g

My Dear Sir!

Let me welcome you home again, & I wish I had better news about myself. Yet, it is not bad, for my affairs are settled; only I know not which way to turn myself, at so critical a moment, & not having been able to see my immediate friends since my arrival, without a little pecuniary aid. If you & Mr Gurney (to whom I did not choose to apply in your absence) c[oul]d assist me, for perhaps a very short time; it w[oul]d be a particular convenience to me, & w[oul]d prevent the settling of my affairs from being almost ineffectual. I sh[oul]d hope to be able to repay it as soon as I got to Town (the middle of next month, when Lady Croft returns out of Cheshire); but, not to engage for more than I am sure of, can you oblige me with £150 till October, when at Michaelmas I am pay’d my midsummer rents? You will show this to Mr G. to whom I have not said a syllable. Such kindness cannot make me more than I am,

My Dear Sir, Your oblig’d friend
H[erber]t Croft.

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Letters omitted from words abbreviated by superscript letters have been supplied in square brackets.

(Dated Saturday. Probably written about the same time as O.13.1, No. 111.)

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Saturday

My Dear Sir!

The picture of my children 5 or 6 years ago, {1} but very like still, I sent, this morning; for you & Mrs T. to see. You can return it on monday; when I will beg you to lend Sophy another body-colour drawing, & Mary Anne another of Mortimer’s, w[hic]h I think Mrs T. was good enough to say she c[oul]d borrow. The bearer brings Mrs T.’s two, & their copies. Sophy has purposely made hers lighter, as I thought yours was too Penseroso; I being fond of the pleasant saddle honest Dryden mentions in his dedication of Virgil, “w[hic]h will be sure to amble, when {2} the world is upon the hardest trot”. Give me gay sunshine; or moonlight, w[hic]h does not add to the gloominess of scenes always gloomy enough.

Dont† forget, if we ever get a good day, to give Sophy a lesson in botany, at Downes’s garden, some morning; as {3} I expect she understands a little. When she leaves Yarmouth (in a fortnight or so, I imagine) she will, I am sure, be happy if Mrs T. can charge her with any commissions in Town. Tomorrow ev[enin]g I mean to come & sit with you.

Ever most truly y[ou]rs
H. Croft

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Letters missing from words abbreviated by superscript letters have been supplied in square brackets.

{1} Presumably the painting of his three daughters as cherubim, attributed to Lemuel Francis Abbott, now in the possession of the National Trust.

{2} This word, which is at the beginning of a line, is preceded by opening inverted commas.

{3} This word resembles ‘or’ more closely, but ‘as’ makes more sense.

† Sic.

(Undated, but probably written about the same time as O.13.1, No. 111.)

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My Dear Sir!

A thousand thanks for your & Mrs T.’s kind civilities about my daughters! It was my intention to have call’d & said we w[oul]d not give the trouble of coming to dinner; but, as Mr Gurney said it was arrang’d, I acquisce’d, & bagg’d him to say we w[oul]d have that pleasure.

And, now, my Dear Sir, whose friendship it gives me so much happiness to have made here, let me beg of you & Mrs Turner to serve me in another respect. You know how well I take correction as a poet, & you shall see I will bear it as well as a father. I beg you both, of whom I think so highly, to tell me what you think of my daughters; & what I can seek to alter. They have been the whole object of my life, both before I went abroad & since. As I have no son, & my first wife’s property & my own (which, on the falling-in of ground-rents in London, must shortly be above three thousand a year) must, on my death, go among my three daughters, equally, by settlement, or to their children or the survivors; I have spar’d no expense, to qualify them for the situations they have a right to, in this odd world.

But {1} my great object has been to keep all three (of course, the eldest, principally) from being coxcombs—to give them that good sense, w[hic]h is worth every thing—& to qualify them to be a comfort to a father, &, at a proper time, to a husband. Not being able to leave this place (but I hope, now, that all will soon be settled by Lady Croft & her friends), & their mother in law being employ’d about my affairs, I made them come hither; & I own that I am nearly satisfied, considering the eldest was only 18 last august. {2} But I shall long, much, to know Mrs T.’s & your real sentiments. Both of you, as parents yourselves & now looking forward about your own children, will excuse a parent’s anxiety about his; especially, when there is not any thing I would not do to prove to Mrs T. & you how truly I am,

My Dear Sir!
your most oblig’d & affect[iona]te friend
H. Croft

P.S. | May I beg you to send me those printed papers tomorrow morning, with Mrs T.’s real opinion? My daughters know nothing about that.

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Letters missing from words abbreviated by superscript letters have been supplied in square brackets.

{1} Written as a catch-word at the foot of a page and repeated at the beginning of the next.

{2} Sophia Croft was born on 18 August 1781.

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Wednesday 22nd Jan[uar]y 1800

My Dear Sir!

My daughters particularly thank Mrs T. for the drawings. Since she was good enough to offer, & my eldest daughter {1} only mixes water colours & lead (having nothing else here), I will thank Mrs T. to lend the box of body-colours she show’d me; of which my daughter will be as sparing as possible, & carefully return the rest. Indeed, they are going away, in a week or a fortnight, with Mrs Walker & Lady Irvine: which brings me to a request.—I wish them much to having the honour of knowing Mrs T.; that they may have a claim to see her, in my house or houses of their own, hereafter, when she wanders from Yarmouth: I wish them to see a Lady, whom they have repeatedly heard me mention as a model of a wife & a mother: & I sh[oul]d like to know whether Mrs T. do not think that few girls of 18 have the good sense of my eldest daughter. The greatest obligation Mrs T. can confer upon me, is to let me introduce my children to her, the evening that I read the tragedy; w[hic]h, too, they have not heard. Never mind M. Septmonville, about whom I spoke before. The sooner we fix, the better. Mr Gurney’s poem {2} is, now, finish’d; so he will not be occupied. It will be a most creditable, elegant, manly thing. Make him keep the lines to his sister; {3} w[hic]h are Ditto, as above.

Yours ditto, as ever, very faithfully
H. Croft.

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{1} Sophia.

{2} Presumably Cupid and Psyche: A Mythological Tale, from the Golden Ass of Apuleius, by Hudson Gurney, published anonymously by J. Wright, ‘opposite Old Bond Street, Piccadilly, London’, in 1799. Dawson Turner’s presentation copy, which he supplemented with a portrait and autograph of the author, is in the British Library (General Reference Collection 11632.g.2). A second edition appeared in 1800.

{3} Hudson Gurney had one full sister, Agatha, who married Sampson Hanbury, and two half-sisters, Elizabeth, who married John Gurney Jr, and Anna. See W. H. Bidwell, Annals of an East Anglian Bank (1900), p. 400.

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Yarmouth;
Monday, 9 Dec[embe]r 1799.

Sir Herbert Croft returns Mr Bush {1} the vol. of Johnson containing the life of Young, {2} with many thanks. He will thank Mr B. to say to Mr Turner, the banker, that, from what he has heard of him in different quarters here, it w[oul]d afford Sir H. C. much pleasure to have the honour of making the acquaintance of Mr Turner, & to show him something that he is writing. But he, first, wishes Mr Turner to look at a book he publish’d on the continent; that he may see, by that & by the french dedication at the end to Sir H. C., how he has employ’d his time abroad; &, by the copy of Bishop Douglas’s letter at the beginning, that he has no occasion to blush for what drove him abroad. {3}—On account of his situation (w[hic]h he trusts will end very shortly, when Lord & Lady Dysart & Lady Croft come from the Isle of Wight to Helmingham in Suffolk), {4} Sir H. C. wishes the liberty he has thus taken with Mr Turner not to be known; especially, too, as the jealousy of others, here, might take offence.

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Letters missing from words abbreviated by superscript letters have been supplied in square brackets.

{1} Frederick Bush, a Yarmouth bookseller, who reprinted Croft’s Chatterton and ‘Love and Madness’ in 1800.

{2} The life of Edward Young in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets was written by Croft himself. Croft’s Letter from Germany (see below) contains an epigraph from Young’s sixth Satire. It may be that he was obliged to borrow a copy of the book because his library had been sold in 1797 to defray some of his debts.

{3} The book referred to, a copy of which appears to have accompanied the present letter, was probably A Letter from Germany to the Princess Royal of England on the English and German Languages, which Croft published at Hamburg in 1797. This does not contain a letter from Bishop Douglas or a French dedication but it is possible that those items were copied in by hand. According to Gilbert Burgess (Introduction to The Love Letters of Miss H and Mr R, 1775-1779), there is a letter in the British Museum (Egerton MSS 2185) from Croft to Bishop Douglas, ‘in which he complains of having been cold-shouldered by Pitt, whose favour he had tried to gain by offering to insert verses in favour of that politician in book he was writing’, and another (Egerton MSS 2186, ff. 88-93) to Bishop Douglas’s son, the Rev. W. Douglas, ‘written from Exeter Gaol, “the common prison—pudet hoc opprobria!” as Croft says, where he was imprisoned for a debt of £40, which he hopes Mr Douglas will send at once.’

{4} Lady Dysart and Lady Croft were sisters. Lady Dysart’s husband Wilbraham had succeeded to the earldom earlier in the year (on 20 February), and Helmingham Hall was one of the properties he inherited.