"DEAR SIR,--I can easily perceive that your friends were no lawyers, who said that there was no statute in Henry the Seventh's reign, which facilitated the alienation of lands, and broke the ancient entails: it is 4 Hen. VII. cap. 24; but a man may read that passage fifty times, and not find any thing that seems, in the least, to point that way. I should certainly have overlooked the meaning of it, had I not been guided by Lord Kames. You must know that it was a practice in the courts of justice, before Henry the Seventh's time, to break entails by a device which seems very ridiculous, but which is continued to this day, and first received the sanction of law during the reign of that prince. You have an entailed estate, I suppose, and want to break the entail. You agree with me that I am to claim the estate by a sham title, prior to the first entailer; you confess in court that my title is good and valid; the judges, upon this confession of the party, adjudge the estate to me; upon which I immediately restore the estate to you, free and unencumbered; and by this hocus-pocus the entail is broke.--Such was the practice, pretty common before Henry the Seventh. All that the parliament then did, was to regulate the method of proceeding in this fine device, and to determine that the titles of minors, and femmes couvert, were not to be injured by it. As to other people, who had an interest to preserve an entail, and who had any good reason to plead in their own favour, they would naturally appear for themselves. This practice is called a fine, and a recovery: fine, from the Latin word finis; because it forecloses all parties, and puts a final issue to their claims and pretensions: a recovery, because a man thereby recovers his estate, without the encumbrance of an entail. "By the bye, I am told, that there are many of these practices still continued in the law of England; which are as foolish, juvenile, and ridiculous, as are to be met with in ---- I mean in ---- I would be understood to mean in ---- any craft or profession of the world.[33:1] "I am writing the History of England, from the accession of Henry the Seventh, and am some years advanced in Henry the Eighth. I undertook this work because I was tired of idleness, and found reading alone, after I had often perused all good books, (which I think is soon done,) somewhat a languid occupation. As to the approbation or esteem of those blockheads who call themselves the public, and whom a bookseller, a lord, a priest, or a party can guide, I do most heartily despise it. I shall be able, I think, to make a tolerable smooth, well-told tale of the history of England during that period; but I own I have not yet been able to throw much new light into it. I begin the Reformation to-morrow. "I find the public, with you, have rejected the Epigoniad, for the present. They may do so if they please; but it has a great deal of merit, much more than any one of them is capable of throwing into a work.