Letter from Uvedale Price, Foxley, to Lady Margaret Beaumont, 1804 January 31 : autograph manuscript signed.

Discussing an architectural model Lady Beaumont had sent him and humorously saying that "the texture was so flimsy, & the surface so glutinous, that the top of one of the towers got loose, & stuck so close to the basement, that it required as much care & patience to separate them, as to unfold the leaves of one of the Herculanean manuscripts"; adding that, however, the model shows that "the effect of the whole will be very striking from whatever part of the place, or of the country it is seen, the general outline being so well varied"; arguing with her over situating the house so that it faces west: "As to a western aspect, I persist in my opinion, that as a principal aspect, & at the time it most deserves it [sic] name from the sun being full upon it, it is, (con rispetto parlando) the devil of an aspect; listing further problems with a western aspect and employing French and Greek phrases to do so; objecting to the glare of a setting sun; recalling a trip to The Hague with Richard Payne Knight, where they visited "Mr Hemsterhuisius" (probably Tiberius Hemsterhuis, or his son Frans), and being in a room at sunset where the sun "filled the whole room with one blaze of light: the window itself, as is always the case in Holland, was shut close, & probably had been so the whole day, or perhaps the whole year. It was an excellent place for a cucumber bed, or perhaps for a dutch Savant's study, but as I had not the advantage of being either a dutch man, or a Savant, or a cucumber, I turned short round & left"; recalling being in another small house facing west and how much it bothered him; adding other arguments; describing the light in his library at Foxley; saying that he has had good health all winter and "nearly a whole month of Cyder-drinking health, a most delightful criterion"; including a passage from Pietro Giannone's history of Naples, in reference to Napoleon's threats of invading England.