You insist so much on my writing to you regularly, from the different places where I may reside during my absence from England, that I begin to believe you are in earnest, and shall certainly obey your commands. I know you do not expect from me a minute account of churches and palaces. However agreeable these may be to the spectator, they generally afford but a slender entertainment when served up in description. There are countries, some of which I may again visit before my return to England, whose appearance always strikes the eye with delight; but it is difficult to convey a precise idea of their beauties in words. The pencil is a more powerful vehicle than the pen for that purpose; for the landscape is apt to vanish from the mind before the description can be read. The manners, customs, and characters of the people may probably furnish the chief materials in the correspondence you exact, with such reflections as may arise from the subject. In these, I apprise you before-hand, I shall take what latitude I please: And though the complexion of my letters may most probably receive some tint or shade of colouring from the country where they may be wrote; yet if I take it into my head to insist on the little tricks of an attorney, when you expect to hear of the politics of a prime minister; or, if I tell you a tale about an old woman, when you are impatient for anecdotes of a great general, you must not fret or fall into a passion; for if you do not permit me to write on what subjects I please, and treat them in my own way, the correspondence you require would become a sad slavery to me, and of consequence no amusement to you. Whereas, if you leave me free and unrestrained, it will at least form some occupation to myself, may wean me from the habit of lounging, and will afford an excuse, in my own mind, for my leaving those parties of pleasure where people are apt to continue, forcing smiles, and yawning spontaneously for two or three hours after all relish is fled. Yet in this dismal condition many remain night after night, because the hour of sleep is not yet arrived;—and what else can they do? Have you never found yourself in this listless situation? Without any pleasure where you are, without any motive to be gone, you remain in a kind of passive, gaping oyster-state, till the tide of the company moves you to your carriage. And when you recover your reflection in your bed-chamber, you find you have passed the two last hours in a kind of humming buzzing stupor, without satisfaction, or ideas of any kind.