The bearer, Mr. William Hone, is desirous to consult some books in the British Museum, respecting a work he is preparing for the press.This is likely Hone's edition of his . In that work he referred to a large number of previously published parodies on scriptural texts; it seems plausible that Hone was beginning more methodically to document these parodies for the publication of his and eventually for his projected but never completed . [return] I have often troubled you in behalf of my friends for an admission to the Reading Room, to which you always pay the most obliging attention. This encourages me to trouble [you] on the present occasion.Hone had met Godwin—the "perfectibility philosopher"—in his early radical days in the late 1790s. At that point, according to Hone's fragmentary autobiography at any rate, he was not impressed with the Godwin's petulant behavior. There is little evidence of further contact between the two prior to this note written shortly after Hone's 1817 Trials. [return]