Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, [Tuesday] and Friday, 3 and 6 September 1816.

Salisbury  Septr 3d 1816

My dear Anne

   Your Brother returned on Thursday Night ….

   Friday aftn Septr 6th   I resume the effort I made three days ago at the earnest request of yr ambassadress Fanny, who enforced your claims with the most solicitous concern for the success of her representation but writing was after all impossible, and now I can only determine to prove my zeal at the expence of disproving my capacity.

   Your Brother then returned a week since weary and exhausted, but encouraged by a large measure of success, and soothed by many a display of Caledonian friendship.  Just before his return I recd a letter informing me that he had been ill, very ill at Edinburgh with inflamation of the lungs, and was obliged to relinquish some of his itinerant labours in the South, and submit himself to the care of two Physicians who happily pronounced his preaching impossible and put him under the discipline of a lancet a blister and repose, besides the agreeable variety of a vegetable diet.  It was well for me that this was the patients own statement on his journey homeward, and that I soon after perceived that like the fever last year either the disease or the nursing had agreed with him.  Indeed I hope he is a little thinner, and certainly he ought to be exceedingly mild in his demeanour on the recent change of regimen

   “Was ever Tartar fierce or cruel

   Upon the strength of water gruel?”

He is however exceedingly disposed to nervous irritation and must try a little change of air in South Britain.  On Monday he takes a ride into your neighborhood. It must not be called a journey.  I do not know that he will be able to visit Bratton but I am sure he will do it if he can, and that you will have the detail of his late adventures by word or letter.

   As to myself, I would fain say nothing.  I am tired every day, and every hour, but I am strengthened too.  I am all paradox and cannot explain myself by any language that would be intelligible to the strangers heart.  I have made no provision for the School wh is poorly furnished with pupils this quarter  I thank you for the tender interest you take in my affairs but I can decide nothing @ ye Warminster Lady ’till I have written again to town.

   Since I began this my dear S– has determined on seeing Bratton Monday.  Pray convince him that his Southern friends can decide on his case as wisely as his Northern tho’ one of them was Dr Abercrombie in his Chariot – I am for the regimen yt will agree with the somewhat jarring propensities of his habit.  His nervous < > is evidently affected.  Adieu I am standing in my chamber half dressed, and it is almost midnight < > weariness of my head and hands, my < > with all its burthens, is sometime < > in the sweet exercise of prayer for you.  Adieu < > shall meet one day, in the land of praise, and < > and oft, again I trust, in the weeping vale that leads to it, & your’s faithfully

                     M G Saffery

Friday Night

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, pp. 355-56 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.3.(4.), Angus Library. Address: Mrs P. Whitaker | Bratton Farm | Westbury | Wiltshire | oblig’d by Mr Larkham.  No postmark. Lines above taken from Canto 3 of Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, in Matthew Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions (London: Jacob Tonson, 1718), p. 367.