“Sir,—I hope that your son will pardon the new tax I am going to lay upon his patience, when I request him, if possible, to put together the scattered limbs of the book, just in the same form in which he received them; so that I may hereafter show to my friends a many-headed, many-handed, many-footed monster, which certainly belongs to no known species; and for which all printers, booksellers, and devils of the press will put up their prayers that it may never propagate its own shapeless race; but remain a solitary individual, for blockheads to stare at, and men of sense to laugh at. I am sure that my learned friend, who writes for me, and all my scholarly acquaintance, will give your son the highest praise for industry and good sense, in making out the confused and deformed contents of a MS. quite unexampled since the invention of letters: for, I verily believe that the negroes of Africa, and the Cherokees of America, and I had almost said the long-tailed animals, from which Lord Monboddo supposes the human race to have been descended, might be taught in two months to write more legibly.—I am your sincere wellwisher,
