"You write most excellent epistles--a fig for other correspondents, with their nonsensical apologies for _'knowing nought about it_,'--you send me a delightful budget. I am here in a perpetual vortex of dissipation (very pleasant for all that), and, strange to tell, I get thinner, being now below eleven stone considerably. Stay in town a _month_, perhaps six weeks, trip into Essex, and then, as a favour, _irradiate_ Southwell for three days with the light of my countenance; but nothing shall ever make me _reside_ there again. I positively return to Cambridge in October; we are to be uncommonly gay, or in truth I should _cut_ the University. An extraordinary circumstance occurred to me at Cambridge; a girl so very like ---- made her appearance, that nothing but the most _minute inspection_ could have undeceived me. I wish I had asked if _she_ had ever been at H----. "What the devil would Ridge have? is not fifty in a fortnight, before the advertisements, a sufficient sale? I hear many of the London booksellers have them, and Crosby has sent copies to the principal watering places. Are they liked or not in Southwell?... I wish Boatswain had _swallowed_ Damon! How is Bran? by the immortal gods, Bran ought to be a _Count_ of the _Holy Roman Empire_. "The intelligence of London cannot be interesting to you, who have rusticated all your life--the annals of routs, riots, balls and boxing-matches, cards and crim. cons., parliamentary discussion, political details, masquerades, mechanics, Argyle Street Institution and aquatic races, love and lotteries, Brookes's and Buonaparte, opera-singers and oratorios, wine, women, wax-work, and weather-cocks, can't accord with your _insulated_ ideas of decorum and other _silly expressions_ not inserted in _our vocabulary_. "Oh! Southwell, Southwell, how I rejoice to have left thee, and how I curse the heavy hours I dragged along, for so many months, among the Mohawks who inhabit your kraals!--However, one thing I do not regret, which is having _pared off_ a sufficient quantity of flesh to enable me to slip into 'an eel skin,' and vie with the _slim_ beaux of modern times; though I am sorry to say, it seems to be the mode amongst _gentlemen_ to grow _fat_, and I am told I am at least fourteen pound below the fashion. However, I _decrease_ instead of enlarging, which is extraordinary, as _violent_ exercise in London is impracticable; but I attribute the phenomenon to our _evening squeezes_ at public and private parties. I heard from Ridge this morning (the 14th, my letter was begun yesterday): he says the poems go on as well as can be wished; the seventy-five sent to town are circulated, and a demand for fifty more complied with, the day he dated his epistle, though the advertisements are not yet half published. Adieu.