Parte No. 112 - Letter from Sir Herbert Croft to Dawson Turner

1 single sheet

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

—————

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.

—————

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.

Pasted to a guard in O.13.1.

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2021.