Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Letter from Uvedale Price, Foxley, to Sir George Beaumont, 1795 June 3 : autograph manuscript signed.

BIB_ID
413844
Accession number
MA 1581.70
Creator
Price, Uvedale, Sir, 1747-1829, sender.
Display Date
Foxley, England, 1795 June 3.
Credit line
Purchased from Benjamin Ifor Evans, 1954.
Description
1 item (4 pages) ; 22.9 x 18.6 cm
Notes
Written from Foxley, Price's estate near Yazor, Herefordshire.
This item was formerly identified as MA 1581 (Price) 4.
This letter is from a large collection of letters written to Sir George Howland Beaumont (1753-1827) and Lady Margaret Willes Beaumont (1758-1829) of Coleorton Hall, and to other members of the Beaumont family.
Provenance
Purchased as a gift of the Fellows from Benjamin Ifor Evans, 1954.
Summary
Teasingly chiding Beaumont for his silence: "Turkey, chine, welch mutton, stilton cheese, Burton ale (a list that makes my mouth water while I am writing it) are all goods of import to you Londoners, but news is your staple commodity, & god knows most shamefully adulterated, but we good easy folks receive it as genuine & are satisfied if you do but give us enough of it"; agreeing to "subscribe to Combe because you desire it" (probably referring to a work in preparation by William Combe), but saying that he supposes it will be "highly monarchical, a sort of anti-Belsham" (possibly a reference to the historian William Belsham); adding that he would like to see Combe again, though he suspects that Combe is the author of several negative reviews of his Letter to Repton: "there is a sort of malicious ingenuity in the manner of asserting the most direct falsehoods, that can only belong to a steady veteran in the art of lying, & nobody has had more [sea?]-service, as Captain O'Callaghan calls it, than my old friend Combe"; adding that Combe has accused him of making concessions to Repton and abandoning his positions: "he of course does not produce any instances or even make references to passages where such concessions or contradictions appear [...] trusting that the indolence of most readers will be equal to his impudence"; informing Beaumont about new developments in his ongoing feud with Repton; saying that a Mr. Marshall has made "a most fierce attack" on him and Richard Payne Knight; explaining that Marshall has somehow gotten the idea that "Knight is a sort of needy Poet & I his Patron & that having some odd quirks of my own about improvement [...] I ordered my Bard to write some verses in order to try the taste of the public & finding his poem was well received, followed it up with my prose"; adding that he knows another attack is coming from a different quarter, but he suspects it will be "candid & ingenious" and he welcomes it; describing in great detail a Welsh friend of his, the painter Thomas Jones, and saying that he will be "proud to see you at Penkerrig [Pencerrig]."