‘Dear Sir,—That I am obliged to trouble you with a letter, purely on my own account, I balance not a moment within myself, between interrupting a friend and being thought ungrateful. The kind mention you have been pleased to make of my Essays on Husbandry in the last number of the Museum Rusticum deserves my warmest thanks and acknowledgements: and though your good opinion of me as _bonus agricola, bonus civis_ may be a little partial, yet sure I am that your favourable report is the overflowing of a generous mind, and under that medicament I must with modesty and diffidence arrange it, feeling at the same time that inward pleasure which Tacitus describes _Dulce est laudari a laudato Viro_. For my own part, my ill health, as I greatly fear, will make me unable to continue much longer on the theatre of agriculture; but if it pleases God that this nation is ever touched with a true vital sense of the uses of husbandry in _their full extent_ (and runs not mad with the visionary notions of Colonies), there will soon be a succession of younger and abler genius’s to perfect _that_, which I have had the honor and satisfaction of suggesting to my beloved but mistaken country. I may say as old Dryden did to Congreve. (You will put aside the vanity of naming Dryden in the same paragraph with myself.) ‘So, when the States one Edward did depose, A greater Edward in his room arose, But now not I but husbandry the curst, And Tom the Second writes like Tom the First. ‘And now, Sir, give me leave to assure you that I am extremely pleased with your last published performance, and the rather as the idea is useful and new. In order to send abroad a truly qualified person, as you have most judiciously characterised him, you do well to address yourself to noble-spirited individuals. Kings and ministers look upon agriculture as only _physical_ means of supplying mankind with food; nor does one glimpse of an idea ever enter their heads or hearts concerning the circulation of profit from the highest to the lowest resulting from thence; nor of the national strength, health, population, and, I may say, the sobriety of getting money which results from that art when it is exercised and maintained in full activity. France might till this time have languished for her enclosure of waste land and exportation of superfluous corn if a shrewd and artful foreigner had not flattered a fair lady into a passion for agriculture; the man I mean is M. Patulle.[34] And indeed, since the times of Augustus and Mæcenas (which latter loved agriculture, before he loved poetry, but lavishly united both in Virgil) and since the time of Constantine IV. to the present hour I can recollect no Princes and Prime Ministers who understood the national advantages of husbandry in their full extent but Henry IV. and Sully.’ [_Letter breaks off here._]