Autograph letter signed : place not specified, to Edward Dickinson, 1753 January 31.

Telling Dickinson that he has arranged to pay a sum of fifteen pounds "[s]ix months after date of the 25th Decr" to his landlord Mr Kyme by drawing on an allowance his mother Lucy Cleland has given him, which "was lodged for me at Campbell the banker's, (of which I pass over the ridicule of appointing one of the greatest of that business in England, to pay a miserable 20 [pence] a day weekly monthly, or quarterly, as I should choose)"; writing that Campbell had originally refused to pay the sum requested, due to the restrictions that Lucy Cleland put on the account, but that he then wrote his mother "a most moving, and rational expostulation, in all the terms of the most cordial respect. She gave herself as usual the air of not reading it, but on my going myself, with a repugnance only vanquishable by the extremities of the Occasion, the temporal redemption of an innocent family from ruin, the letter was taken in, and on my sending this morning for an answer, she ordered that whoever came for it should apply to You"; making a proposal: "let Mrs Cleland name any person she pleases, and would to God it were yourself, no one so fit, and I believe so well inclined to heal the bleeding wounds of our Family, or any other, and I will chearfully submitt to whatever is pronounced by her own Referee, as Just, and reasonable"; writing that if Dickinson were to effect a reconciliation between Cleland and his mother, he would consider him "my temporal redeemer," and even if it were not possible, "I shall not only greatly thank you for your past candour, and even generosity, but take care to impute the fault, where alone it is imputable, and take my measure accordingly. I am perishing, and desire to perish unrevenged, though not to perish unacquitted to God, and Man."