Letter from Uvedale Price, Foxley, to Lady Margaret Beaumont, 1805 February 9 : autograph manuscript signed.

Making various classical references, including quoting a line in Greek from the Iliad, and saying: "I know you love a bit of greek in your heart & I love to indulge you when I can, but my stock is but small"; asking how the construction is going at Coleorton, and asking also whether progress has been made on the nursery; saying that he wishes Foxley and Coleorton were much closer to each other and that they could ride between them: "there are so many sources of pleasure in the society of those who have decidedly the same tastes & pursuits, & who, in this case, would have a new & perpetual source of interest in consulting each other on their respective improvements, that I should be glad to risk the danger that is apprehended, when our greatest delights are too familiar & of too easy access"; quoting Madame de Grignan on this subject; promising to send her some plants for her nursery, particularly those that may not be easy to find around Coleorton, like the wild service tree; saying that Richard Payne Knight came by and read him a dissertation in Latin on the Odyssey and the Iliad: "as far as I could judge from hearing a thing read out to me in a language I am not much in the habit of reading, & never of hearing, I should think it a very ingenious dissertation"; saying that the dissertation asserts that the Iliad was written a century before the Odyssey, and that the two texts had different authors; describing Homer as "neither more nor less than an Emigrè, & at the exact time of the Dorian invasion" and comparing him to Jacques Delille; commenting on Sir George's suffering from rheumatism and the attendant remedies; mentioning the "little Roscius" (the child-actor William Henry West Betty) and Sir George's accounts of him.