Some days into the trip with the Hornecks, this letter suggests the expedition to France was not as harmonious as anticipated. In a later letter to their mutual friend Bennet Langton, Johnson confirms that the trip had not gone well: ‘Dr Goldsmith has been at Paris with the Hornecks not very delightfully to either side.’ In addition to financial pressures, the presence of Joseph Hickey, lawyer to Burke and Reynolds and who had much more up-to-date knowledge of Paris than he, appears to have irked Goldsmith, cast somewhat into the shadows. As later correspondence shows (see Letters 35 and 64), Goldsmith and the Hornecks repaired their friendship. This letter, with its litany of complaints about the diurnal aggravations of Continental travel, provides a humorous counterpoint to the cosmopolitan Goldsmith evoked by his poem The Traveller. The overarching sense of the letter is of a man who is missing the metropolitan whirl of London and its literary homosociality.

The copy-text is the manuscript in the Free Library of Philadelphia. It was first published by Prior in 1837. It is addressed: ‘To | Sir Joshua Reynolds | Leicester Fields | London’. The postmark is incomplete at the edge of the sheet but most likely records 4 August.