Autograph letter signed : place not specified, to [Edward Dickinson], undated [circa 1752].

Writing that, "[o]n an intimation from Mr Auld that Mrs. Cleland had referred to me to you," he is taking the liberty of introducing himself by letter, "being really too ill to wait upon you"; mentioning terms that Lucy Cleland has proposed (possibly for the payment of an annuity), which he refuses to accept; responding, through Dickinson, to his mother: "Mrs. Cleland says she has no resentment for my abusing her. Gracious God! how has she the heart thus to insult my weakness! to treat that as an abuse which I purely meant as the tenderest representation to her of her own ill-usage of herself in me: of the perversion in short to the dis-honour of herself, and of her family, of that exquisite and fine sense of hers, which seems to be the gift of God in his anger, as it only serves her to find out reasons, thank Heav'n's, above the reach of the race of ordinary women, for the destruction of her children"; describing a humiliating episode when she fitted him out "for half-a-crown, at a Wapping slop-shop with a Pea-Jacket, and Honey comb breeches"; accusing her of "murder[ing] my reputation, by false-Heroics, by spinning of Tragedy upon a miscarriage common enough in the worthless course of the present world"; writing that he hopes he has never accused her of "senseless obstinacy, so vulgarly a female vice"; referring again to the proposal, in which she offered him more than he had asked for: "I might rationally entreat of her not to mock my distresses with a relief I could not accept in her way, but to procure me the assistance I wanted in my own, at so much less an expence"; describing a disastrous expedition to South Carolina, in the course of which he discovered that his contact there, a Mr. Fryer, had died and so he decided to return to England: "I was welcomed from this vile insignificant voyage, with a reproach, as for a fault that I had come home. yes, for a fault! and punished for it too" by the retraction of an annuity of £50 that his mother and his aunt Lady Margaret Allen had originally offered him; concluding "my illness, and pain afflict me so, that I cannot longer hold the pen, on this disagreeable subject."