See headnote to previous letter. Goldsmith and Bindley continue their exchange here with Goldsmith noting Bindley's younger brother's illness. James Bindley (1739–1818) was a book collector and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge (1762–8). Goldsmith writes of him: ‘I never knew any one so short a time whose mind I fancy’d more like my own, that is in other words that I loved better.’ The younger Bindley assisted Edmond Malone with the third edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson (1799). He was also a friend of John Nichols, who described him in the fourth volume of Illustrations as a ‘kind-hearted and intelligent Bibliographer’. James Bindley suffered with ill health through much of his life.

The copy-text is the manuscript in the Beinecke Library, Yale University. It was first published in 1964 by Balderston in the Yale University Library Gazette, the year after Yale had acquired it from a private collection in Australia. Below Goldsmith's signature at the foot of the letter ‘Author of the Traveller & other works of genius’ is written in a different, later hand.