Letter signed : London, to Benjamin Kennicott, 1754 July 15.

A sardonic attack on Dr. William King, the Jacobite principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford: "What strange People are some of your leading ones, at Oxford! If your occasional Orator were to choose his Supreme Governor, he would not find a Dr King permitted to arraign the Justice of his Government, and to reflect on Laws actually passed, and in Force. There cannot be a greater Instance of the Lenity of the Government he abuses, than his pestilent Harangues so publicly made, with impunity, furnishes all his Readers with . . . He is old, you say. Old, yet so abandoned of Decency! . . . What Encouragement to Parents and Guardians to send their Youth to a Seminary so governed! And when your Capital Men make such poor Figures, with their short written-down speeches, and the men who have been in the World, so much out-do them, at their own Weapons; why blamed you a Friend of yours, for not using his little Powers in favour of the Universities in this Kingdom?" At the beginning of the letter he dismisses Kennicott's excessive gratitude for Richardson's hospitality: "Why . . . so many Acknowledgments for common Civilities only?" and asks him on the last page for a preface for his volume of "Sentiments of the Three Pieces" stating that "I hate to think of Prefaces; for I have an Aversion to all Parading." Richardson's "Sentiments, Maxims and Reflections from Clarissa, Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison" was published in 1755).