Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, [Tuesday], 16 April 1811.

Salisbury  April 16th 1811

My ever dear Anna,

   The air is again balmy and the days are long when shall we see you here? Your visit was to occur during this month and this is the 16th day I have thought almost every hour for nearly a fortnight that I would write and hasten you.  But I have every day hoped for a better supply on the morrow, than the morrow has yet supplied. Today too I am quite doubtful whether my correspondent should complain most of the heaviness of my head or heart.  Both ache, both in despite of my best efforts seem unconquerably dull, so that a delectable morning is of course before you  indeed my dearest Anna, there is nothing I so much dislike in such moments as writing to you and yet I am not satisfied with silence.  I am looking better I think than when I wrote last and shall hope for a brighter state of Mind – the dear Children are pretty well Sam. improves with the advancing Season, & tho still delicate has lost the whiteness & limpness that distressed me.  Lucy too is better tho wretchedly nervous but poor Ryland is quite an Invalid & I fear too in the old way at least there is evidently an affection of the liver  I suppose Cheltenham will again be resorted to.  Salter & Mason are pretty well.  My dear S– is by no means on the sick list – in point of appearance, he would be most affectionately remembered if he was at home, or rather within door’s which alas! is seldom the case.  He performed as Father at two weddings yesterday. To Mr Coughner he gave Anne Pearce.  To Mr Lane Sarah Chapman.  The former persons left us in the Morning soon after the Ceremony in order to reach their home at Trowbridge. The latter remained with us during the day: to such a circle you may suppose there was much of the gay and the ludicrous in the occasional remarks produced by attendance at the < >  &c  but I believe after all the solemn preponderated thro the day – Westfield was with us in the afternoon – & exhausted Lucy who engaged with him in a violent argument, she was somewhat smitten with the good meaning of her antagonist certainly not with his well adjusted argument or the ostensible import of it, wh was that a Man might be filled with love to God and go to hell  in the experience I can entertain but one opinion of this singular Man wh is advantageous enough to every thing but his intellect & this I think has danced on the wild waves of speculation till it has suffered shipwreck – I have been every week of late one excepted to Bodenham but Thursday Night I slept there in order to hear Mr Dashwood on Good Friday  S– & myself were of one opinion @ the Sermon it was very good & gracefully delivered I mean rather graciously than elegantly but wanting the force of discriminating application.  Several persons from Salisbury go on the Sab. to hear him at Nunton & put up with the nonconformists between  what a proof this is that the dissipated, irreligious Clergy, make what are called dissenters.  Lucy is sitting by, & says beg her to come  < > scarcely content with my writing just < > because she wants to fascinate my heavy < > with Scott’s Lady of the Lake –  I am thinking with Watts of something dearer to me than even poetry & saying with all my disconsolation 

“To Him, who knoweth the mind of the Spirit,

Thy word which I have rested on,

Shall help my heaviest hours!”

Adieu  I am called from you, from Lucy, and the Minstrel of the Border.  Your’s indeed I cannot say, how tenderly and faithfully

                     Maria Grace Saffery

Carey says send my love  so say all @ me only rather more courteously

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, pp. 311-12 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.2.(9.), Angus Library. Address: Salisbury April 16th 1811 | Mrs P. Whitaker, | Bratton Farm | near Westbury, | Wilts. Postmark: Salisbury, 16 April 1811.

Mr Lane, Sarah Chapman, and Anne Pearce were all members of the Baptist congregation meeting in Brown Street, Salisbury. The Lane family appear on several occasions in the Saffery-Whitaker correspondence; they remained active members of the church into the 1830s. Anne Pearce was probably the daughter of either Edward or Thomas Pearce, coachmakers in Salisbury (see UBD, vol. 4, p. 561). Other references above are either Samuel Francis Dashwood (1773-1826), rector at Stanford-on-Sour, Nottinghamshire, from 1800 to 1826; or James Dashwood (1740–1815), rector of Doddington, Cambridgeshire, and vicar of Long Sutton, Lincolnshire; two lines from  Isaac Watts's Psalm CXIX, from The Psalms of David, p. 260; and Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which after 1803 included his popular narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel.