"The chief reason why I send you this scrawl, is to offer you a bed here at your return, on the same floor with myself, and a chamber as pleasant and as well furnished as my own, viz. with demigods and beauties. I earnestly request you to accept of it, and not to persist in the foolhardy resolution of sleeping in a newly painted room. If Hammond is obliged to have his house painted, pray oblige me with your compliance, and, in giving me the preference, you will be at home, and your brother can surely not except against it, considering the distance at which he lives. I will not take a refusal. "I feel my head so stupid, my hand so disobedient, my pen so execrable, my ink such a mudpond, that I ought in mercy to save you the trouble of deciphering more. Adieu, love me as I do you, neither more nor less, and hasten your return. "Ever, "Henry Fuseli." "Somerset House, September 12, 1817. To John Knowles, Esq." I accepted of his kind offer, and in my letter doing this, gave him a transcript of an epitaph in Latin, inscribed on a brass plate which is affixed to a pillar in the north aisle of Scarborough Church, and which is not only admired there for the expression of feeling which it contains, but for its Latinity. This epitaph is as follows:-- "Dum te, chara Uxor, gelido sub marmore pono, Illustret vigili lampade funus amor; Heu! periit pietas dulcissima, casta cupido, Teque omnis virtus quæ negat esse meam.-- Oh! quàm felicem nuperrima Sponsa beâsti! Nunc pariter miserum reddis amata Virum. Iste dolor levis est charos ubi casus amicos, Mors ubi disjungit, sola tremenda venit." "In piam Memoriam Annæ charissimæ Uxoris, hæc dedicavit mæstissimus Maritus J. North: Obiit die Xmo 4to Augusti, Anno Dom. 1695, Ætatis suæ 22." In answer to this letter, he wrote to me as follows:-- "Putney-hill, September 20, 1817. "MY DEAR SIR, "You have given me the greatest pleasure in accepting the offer which I took the freedom of making to you; and my wife, the moment she hears of it, will as much be flattered by your kindness as myself,--for, before she went off, she earnestly desired me to make the request. "Thanks for the epitaph,--but with all possible respect for Mr. J. North's Latinity and feelings, and notwithstanding the very free, correct, and scholastic manner in which you have transcribed his effusion; bowing likewise to the taste and discrimination of the "Learned" where you are; I must own that the sense of the fourth, and construction of the seventh and eighth lines are not very clear to me.