Part No. 111 - Letter from Sir Herbert Croft to Dawson Turner

1 single sheet

Transcript

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.

Pasted to a guard in O.13.1.

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