Autograph letter signed : place not specified, to [Edward Dickinson], 1755 October 23.

Writing that Dickinson should not imagine that he wants to draw him into "bandying of letters," and that his last letter was meant only as a "memorial of the bitter disappointment I have lately incurred, through the perseverance of Mrs Cleland's, open, and known disowning of me, of which my life must soon be the victim"; claiming that he never intended to say anything derogatory about his mother: "My filial awe, gratitude, and even compassion for that violent state, one would suppose in a mother's estrangement from an only, and unfortunate son: though she herself does not think it so, or how soon might she end it? I say, all these affections are not only inrooted in my heart, but I respect myself too highly to be wanting in my duty to her, having ever held in the highest horror and contempt any irreverence to parents: and if the force of the rack to which she condemned me and is not weary of seeing me broke alive upon it, without being moved to take me down, have formerly forced from me exclamations seemingly inconsistent with this my profession, they are what I can never forgive myself, and find the hardest for me to forgive her being the cause of them, even I who could find the most exquisite joy in forgiving her everything"; mentioning "an exhibition lodged at Campbell's [the banker]"; writing that, despite his mother's ill-treatment of him, he pities her, "whilst it murders me, whilst it keeps me dragging my existence down in the dirt, and robs me of all the patrimony my poor father left me, and seems to justify the extremities to which it must of all necessity subject a solitary, detached, unsupported individual, and surely I have found her base negative of countenance, her non-concurrence to my Interest as fatally destructive as the most active rancor of emnity"; admitting "Family-differences are common [.] I know they are [...] But, is it common for a mother to keep up an immortal resentment?"; writing "I own, I now, and now only, utterly give up all hopes of a reconciliation. Despair has taken absolute possession of me, my heart is broken: and my head is distracted. My life is at once my execration and reproach: yet, God forbid, that the last instants of it, should be violated with a single thought towards Mrs. Cleland harsher than wishing her from my soul, that forgiveness from Heaven, which she can have the heart to withhold from me. As this is the last trouble you ever can receive from me, I am persuaded your humanity will forgive it."