189. Robert Bloomfield to Thomas Inskip, 27 June 1806* 

City Road, London

June 27. 1806

Neighbour Inskip

Your letter is full of the genuine feelings of Nature, and I regret that I canot be with you, therefore enjoy the feast to the utmost of your power, and store it in your brain, as the poor Camel stores the product of the fountain spring to sustain his strength across the Desert. Accept my thanks for your kind wishes, and give my respects to your friends upon the Ivel. [1] I do not feel that I have any thing to add to what I impudently said on the Poem, and if I had, I should prefer telling you in the way of gossip. This delicious rain will make your roses sweeter, and I sit with a smile of pleasure to see it fall. During the late hot days I somehow or other caught a cold of a more violent kind than I have had for these ten years past, the effects for a day or two were alarming. I am now recoverd, and I mention it not with a view of exciting 'lack a days', and causing long chins, but to show you that while you were probably all hop and kick upon the banks of the Brook, I was forced to nurse my loggerhead upon a table with scarce an eye to see out of. And here me thinks I could moralize about the strange tenements that we live in, and all that sort of fun, but I have not time just now; and besides I have the Eolian Harps in hand, and I find such pleasure in the use of the saw and the plane that I am determined to fetch up my arrears in writing to day, and attack the Harps tomorrow. And so I have only to wish you happiness which I do most sincerely, and to desire our respects to Mrs Inskip and the twigg, and to your friend Weston.

I am yours truly

Robt Bloomfield