Autograph letter signed : London, to Lucy Cleland, 1758 March 6.

Telling her that he learned of the death of his aunt Margaret Allen with "infinite concern"; expressing his grief and asking to share hers: "Do not then grudge me, at least, the cold consolation of joining my affliction with yours, though at the distance your unrelentingness prescribes to me"; continuing "My now sincerest wish is that the news of my own death may soon compensatively comfort you for that which you are now lamenting. Dirty cares, pitifull distresses, the sense of which is redoubled at once by their indignity, and by the heart-breaking circumstances of their being owing to your implacability, have long impaired my health, and made the only delivery I now expect from them, my hourly prayer. All that I complain of, is its being so slow"; lamenting her coldness towards him, "whose faults great, very great as they may have been towards you, have still surely been infinitely greater towards himself"; explaining that he can't help himself: "what I am, I am constitutionally [...] My passions and errors are not more my choice than the features of my face [...] Even my greatest fault, my contempt and ignorance of the value of money, but just when I feel the pinching want of it, and thence my improvidence of a child of four years of age; even that fault, I say, is more nearly related to Virtue than to Vice. At least you cannot but be somewhat favorable to it, when you consider it was exactly my father's, and has been but too faithfully transmitted with his blood to me. But I have not, as he had, a Mrs. Cleland to take care of me, and to supplement that so ruinous defect"; writing that he hopes she does not grieve too severely for his aunt, since her infirmities must have made her death "an unhappiness only to her survivors, not surely to herself."