The following letter was written by John Man to his former pupil, Thomas Frognal Dibdin.  This letter is MS 2974.

This morning I received from Mr. Snare your very acceptable present, for which I beg you will accept my best thanks and congratulations on your so soon having brought it to publication. I have as yet only taken a peep at it’s contents just sufficient to convince me that in point of ornament and beauty of type it is superior to most; the literary art will I have no doubt afford me much pleasure in the reading for I am writing to confess though a first rate bibliomaniac it is long since I have sought anything more from books than pleasure, reading more for amusement than for intellectual improvement. The latter you will allow with me it is time to give up when a man has arrived at the age of 62 when it is too late to recover the past or lay a foundation for future knowledge in a very few years if not days to be committed to the grave with the professor. As I have always considered you one of my family it is very natural I should take a pleasure at the success of your endeavour to instruct and improve posterity, for I am much mistaken if the name of Dibden will not be as well known in the centuries to come as in the present.

Being as you know, a very modest old fellow and consequently unwilling to intrude myself on Mr Bere I commissioned our friend Frank, or rather our frank friend to request the favour of you to make our best thanks to that gentleman and his lady for their present which was a great treat to us all. What only we had to regret was the disappointment in not having the young gentleman to partake of it but more so the cause which denied us his company.

From what you say I am fearful that his commission was never executed and as my silence must place me in an unfavourable light with that gentleman I beg you will do your best to set the matter in it’s true light and make the best apology for me you can.

Frank is very well and as he expects to see you soon I hope I shall also have that pleasure, we have a bed at your service but don’t come again when I am from home as you did last time as found with much regret on my return. If you could stay a week with us we could go over many of our old walks, call to mind times of old, crack jokes and be merry.

[On the back Dibdin has written]

* My old schoolmaster at Reading with whom I was place a five years of age when I arrived from India.