The second series of letters begins after Oliver had returned to England about a couple of years, and was “by a very little practice as a physician and a very little reputation as a poet making a shift to live,” as he describes it in a letter to his brother-in-law Daniel Hodson, dated from the Temple Exchange Coffee House, on 27 December, 1757. His brother Charles Goldsmith had paid Oliver a visit in London, and had informed him “of the fatigue you were at in soliciting a subscription to relieve me, not only among my friends and relations, but acquaintance in general. Tho my pride might feel some repugnance at being thus relieved, yet my gratitude can suffer no diminution.... Whether I eat or starve, live in a first floor or four pairs of stairs high, I still remember them [my friends] with ardour, nay my very country comes in for a share of my affection. Unaccountable fondness for country, this maladie du Pays, as the french call it.” He hopes that if he can be absent six weeks from London next summer “to spend three of them among my friends in Ireland. My design is purely to visit, and neither to cut a figure nor levy contributions--neither to excite envy nor solicit favour: in fact my circumstances are adapted to neither. I am too poor to be gazed at, and too rich to need assistance.” Percy here omits what he calls “some mention of private family matters.” The letter is at this point frayed and imperfect, but these words can be made out: “Charles is furnished with everything necessary, but why ... stranger to assist him. I hope he will be improved in his ... against his return [from Jamaica]. Poor Jenny! But it is what I expected. My mother too has lost Pallas! My dear Sir, these things give me real uneasiness, and I could wish to redress them. But at present there is hardly a Kingdom in Europe in which I am not a debtor” etc. After an interval, Goldsmith had what was for him a real bout of letter-writing to a number of his kinsfolk and friends, to solicit their assistance in getting subscriptions for his “Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe” on which he was engaged, and which was about to be published. On 7 August, 1758, he wrote to his cousin and school-fellow Edward Mills that his “Essay on the Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe,” as it was then called, was “now printing in London, and I have requested Mr. Radcliff, Mr. Lawder, Mr. Bryanton, my brother Mr. Henry Goldsmith, and my brother-in-law Mr. Hodson, to circulate my proposals among their acquaintances.”