Letter from Uvedale Price, Foxley, to Lady Margaret Beaumont, 1795 February 5 : autograph manuscript signed.

Thanking her for a letter; saying "It gives me great satisfaction to find that you approve of my answer to Mr. Repton after having read it alone, for a good reader, like Sir George, by slurring over the weak, & impressing the strong parts of a book, will give it a momentary value which the author pays dear for afterwards"; advising them that they should spend the money they saved by avoiding "that most notorious dupeur Mr. March the dentist" on a landscape by Rubens; commenting on the idea of Rubens having a "meretricious style"; "though I love such chaste & genuine nature as we see in Claude, yet I equally dread a great deal of cold, honest matter of fact under that name, & which in reality is the grossest of all impositions"; referring to a mistake made by the printer in the title, which makes it sound "as if I recommended the application of the principles of gardening to painting [...] I have felt still more provoked by this stupid blunder, & at my own negligence since I read your letter"; telling her that Richard Payne Knight "writes me word that he means to attack many parts of Repton's letter to me in the notes of his new edition of his poem of the landscape; so our game at controversy will now be as regular as a game at whist. -- Knight & Price partners against Repton, with Brown as a Dummy, whose cards of course Repton must manage: if Sir George will now & then look over my hand, & advise me, I think we shall win a bumper"; praising her description of a storm and saying that he is tempted to send her letter back to Sir George "so that he may paint in colours what you have so well painted in words"; giving his thoughts on "the poetical imagination" and its relationship to visual art; recalling pleasant dinners in London with Lord and Lady Abercorn (probably John James Hamilton, Marquess of Abercorn, and his wife); concluding "If you have written me a long letter I think I have had my revenge, so take care how you provoke me again"; asking to be remembered to Sir George.