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That ever it should be a task to me to
write to you ! and yet such it has been for
some time, yea for a long time, because I
must needs give you a scolding which is
bad, and having nothing particularly good to
accompany it with and sweeten it. Possibly you
may be returned from the Black Sea before
this reaches you: if so you will have been
cursing and storming at me for not sending
you a recent letter to meet you at your arrival.
Your eyes will then have been saluted
with the pure unmixed misery of a Q.S.P.ian
letter unaccounted for and unsoftened
by any one of mine. That letter I did not
read: it was offer'd me, but having been
bothering myself with him and Mr Yard about
you more than enough already, I did not
care to bother myself any more.
I have various articles of accusation against
you circumstanced as you were in point of money
1. For going to this damned Black Sea. 2. For
refusing the offer made you: 3. for building
on so ideal a foundation as the event of
your getting a capital from this country: 4.
for writing a rambling of expectation,
grasping at 150 impossibilities at once without
any grounds to go upon. 5. for expecting
that under with all these documents before my eyes
I should place an implicit and idolatrous confidence
in your judgment and savoir-faire.
Other articles perhaps may start up before I
have done.
1. About the Black Sea. In what possible shape
could it advance your views? A la bonne heure
if you had had money of your own to pay the
expence with. It would have been an agreable journey,
and in some degree an instructive one. As
it is too, it may enable you to talk with Kitty
to
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to some better advantage. But is it possible your
success with her can turn at all upon any such
point? If it be an advantage to you, it is
nothing that can serve to distinguish you in
her eyes from a thousand other people she is
seeing continually. To anticipate the objection on
the score of the expence you assert boldly that
the expence will be no greater than if you were
to stay at Petersbourg the same time - This
plea upon the face of it seems as if it could
not be true; and therefore I am sorry that
you urged it: and if indeed it is true, the
case is as bad that way. It was the 19 May
O.S. (the 30th N.S.) that you were to set off.
Your stay was to be two months. In that
time you were to have spent about £70
I think over and above your 1st letter of
credit. How in the of you
had still a hundred pounds of your letter of
credit unspent: therefore had you staid at home
you could not by your own account have
spent less than £170 in the interval between
the of and the 30th of July
the time by which you reckoned to be returned: being months and days
This in at the rate of a year. an interval of months and days.
You were then losing at the rate of so much
a year at a time when all your own money
had been gone: when near as much more
as you left England with was spent, and
when you had no assured means that you knew of of getting
even that debt paid, still less of getting a
supply to serve as a fund for fresh credit:
my honour all the while in Lob's pound,
with the chapter of accidents to rest upon.
Mulford's £100 when got in (at the same time
that you knew his idea was not to furnish it
all at once) you knew in general could not
by
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Identifier: | JB/539/069/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 539.
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1780-08-06 |
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539 |
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069 |
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001 |
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Correspondence |
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Jeremy Bentham |
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