The least scrap of a letter will be received with the greatest joy. Write, therefore, though it were only to give us the comfort of having a piece of paper which has recently passed through your hands; Honora will put in a little postscript, were it only to tell me that she is _my very sincere friend_, who will neither give me love nor comfort--very short, indeed, Honora, was thy last postscript! But I am too presumptuous; I will not scratch out, but I _un_say. From the little there _was_ I received more joy than I deserve. This _cher Jean_ is an impertinent fellow, but he will grow discreet in time. You must consider him as a poor novice of _eighteen_, who, for all the sins he may commit, is sufficiently punished in the single evil of being one hundred and twenty miles from Lichfield. My mother and sisters will go to Putney in a few days, to stay some time. We none of us like Clapton. _I_ need not care, for I am all day long in town, but it is avoiding Scylla to fall into Charybdis. You paint to me the pleasant vale of Stow in the richest autumnal coloring. In return, I must tell you that my zephyrs are wafted through cracks in the wainscot; for murmuring streams I have dirty kennels; for bleating flocks, grunting pigs; and squalling cats for birds that incessantly warble. I have said something of this sort in my letter to Miss Spearman, and am twinged with the idea of these epistles being confronted, and that I shall recall to your memory the fat knight's love-letters to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page. Julia, perhaps thou fanciest I am merry--alas! But I do not wish to make you as doleful as myself; and besides, when I would express the tender feelings of my soul, I have no language which does them justice; if I had, I should regret that you could not have it fresher, and that whatever one communicates by letter must go such a roundabout way before it reaches one's correspondent--from the writer's heart, through his head, arm, hand, pen, ink, paper, over many a weary hill and dale, to the eye, head, and heart of the reader. I have often regretted our not possessing a sort of faculty which should enable our sensations, remarks, etc., to arise from their source in a sort of exaltations, and fall upon our paper in words and phrases properly adapted to express them, without passing through an imagination whose operations so often fail to second those of the heart. Then what a metamorphose should we see in people's style! How eloquent those who are truly attached! how stupid they who falsely profess affection! Perhaps the former had never been able to express half their regard; while the latter, by their flowers of rhetoric, had made us believe a thousand times more than they ever felt--but this is whimsical moralizing.