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