Letter 2697

Johnston sends the papers he promised Sloane, an account of his Lord’s sickness, and natural rarities which ‘are copies from my Lords Booke that he writ him self as his Repository.’ He writes that many of them are common things and others are of no use. He leaves it up to Sloane’s judgement to mark anything he deems publishable and asks him to assign the right names where his Lord and his Lord’s amanuensis are mistaken. He writes: ‘there is still wanting a Collection of the Rare pictures my Lord has with an Account by what Masters they were made’ in English. He wonders whether it is worth printing. Johnston directs Sloane’s response to the house of the Countess Dowager at Millbank in Westminster. Johnston was a physician, antiquarian, and political theorist celebrated for his book ‘The Excellency of Monarchical Government’ (1686) (Mark Goldie, Johnston, Nathaniel (bap. 1629?, d. 1705), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14946, accessed 21 June 2013]).