BIB_ID
414146
Accession number
MA 1581.105
Creator
Price, Uvedale, Sir, 1747-1829, sender.
Display Date
Foxley, England, 1803 April 29.
Credit line
Purchased from Benjamin Ifor Evans, 1954.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 23.1 x 18.7 cm
Notes
Written from Foxley, Price's estate near Yazor, Herefordshire.
Address panel with postmarks: "Lady Beaumont / Grosvenor Square / London."
This item was formerly identified as MA 1581 (Price) 39.
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.
Address panel with postmarks: "Lady Beaumont / Grosvenor Square / London."
This item was formerly identified as MA 1581 (Price) 39.
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
Saying that a whole army of bugs could not prevent him from taking possession of a certain "green bed"; quoting two lines from Tartuffe; recalling being bitten by bugs when he was nineteen in Glasgow and saying that he has not been bitten since; adding that he would like to accept her invitation to visit them, but his daughter has been very ill with influenza and he does not feel that he can leave her and his wife Caroline while the former is recovering; discussing flowers and saying that, if she would like to see "a whole country one immense bed of them," she should come to Herefordshire in a week or ten days, "for the blow is likely to be the finest ever known"; saying that he supposes there are not many good drawings currently for sale in London; writing "General Morrison's were to have been sold this spring, & from them Sir George might have made an excellent foundation for a collection. [Richard Payne] Knight was consulted about their value & therefore should know something of the present general's intention. I am curious to know what is to become of them, as I have fixed my eye on a few that I had remarked some thirty years ago in old [George] Knapton's time"; relaying in a postscript Lady Caroline's method of dealing with bedbugs (rubbing the wood of the bed affected with crab vinegar) and adding two lines from Henry Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies; concluding "In short a good housekeeper should feel about her beds as Cæsar did about his wife with respect to another sort of bug that infests the same places; they (that is the beds) should not only be free from such vermin, but even of the suspicion of harbouring them."
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