‘Along with the table you will find a MS. paper, exhibiting the importance of the information I am thus labouring to collect; you will print it or suppress it as you think best. I also send in MS. a table of cases calling for relief; a general map of _pauper land_ with all the _roads_ to it. Few, if any, of the projects I have seen but what have appeared (the arch-project not excepted) to bear an exclusive—at least a predilective—reference to some of these cases, overlooking or slighting the rest. I send it in the state in which I propose printing it for my own book; but, in the meantime, if it be worthy the honour of a place in the “Annals,” it is altogether at your service. This preparatory insertion will turn to the advantage of the work itself, if any of your correspondents (not forgetting their editor) would have the goodness to contribute their remarks to the emendation of it. You will not easily conceive—few heads, at least, but yours are qualified to conceive—the labour it has cost me to bring the two tables to this state. As to the work at large, it will occupy two independent, though connected volumes. Pauper systems compared; pauper management improved—the last the romance, the Utopia, to which I had once occasion to allude. Romance? How could it be anything _less_? I mean to an author’s partial eye. In proportion as a thing is excellent, when established, is it anything but _romance_, and theory, and speculation, till the touch of the _seal_ or the _sceptre_ has converted it into practice. Distress, at least, distress, the very life and soul of romance, cannot be denied to mine; for in this short and close-packed specimen already you behold it in all its shapes. Magnanimous president! accomplished secretary! ye, too, have your romance. Heaven send you a happy catastrophe and a _fettered land_ “a happy deliverance.” Patience! patience! ye too, before you are comforted, must bear to be tormented. ‘Apropos of presidents. The high priest of Ceres, having divined or not divined my recent occupations, has been pleased to send me a mandate in form, summoning me to devote myself to this branch of his goddess’s service, that the fruit of my labours may be consecrated in her temple at Whitehall; so that whatever other requisites may fail me, I shall be in no want of auspices.