Thus thou seest that the old peer’s letter came very seasonably.  I thank thee for that.  But as to his sentences, they cannot possibly do me good.  I was early suffocated with his wisdom of nations.  When a boy, I never asked anything of him, but out flew a proverb; and if the tendency of that was to deny me, I never could obtain the least favour.  This gave me so great an aversion to the very word, that, when a child, I made it a condition with my tutor, who was an honest parson, that I would not read my Bible at all, if he would not excuse me one of the wisest books in it:  to which, however, I had no other objection, than that it was called The Proverbs.  And as for Solomon, he was then a hated character with me, not because of his polygamy, but because I had conceived him to be such another musty old fellow as my uncle.

Well, but let us leave old saws to old me.  What signifies thy tedious whining over thy departing relation?  Is it not generally agreed that he cannot recover?  Will it not be kind in thee to put him out of his misery?  I hear that he is pestered still with visits from doctors, and apothecaries, and surgeons; that they cannot cut so deep as the mortification has gone; and that in every visit, in every scarification, inevitable death is pronounced upon him.  Why then do they keep tormenting him?  Is it not to take away more of his living fleece than of his dead flesh?—­When a man is given over, the fee should surely be refused.  Are they not now robbing his heirs?—­What has thou to do, if the will be as thou’dst have it?—­He sent for thee [did he not?] to close his eyes.  He is but an uncle, is he?

Let me see, if I mistake not, it is in the Bible, or some other good book:  can it be in Herodotus?—­O I believe it is in Josephus, a half-sacred, and half-profane author.  He tells us of a king of Syria put out of his pain by his prime minister, or one who deserved to be so for his contrivance.  The story says, if I am right, that he spread a wet cloth over his face, which killing him, he reigned in his place.  A notable fellow!  Perhaps this wet cloth in the original, is what we now call laudanum; a potion that overspreads the faculties, as the wet cloth did the face of the royal patient; and the translator knew not how to render it.

But how like forlorn varlet thou subscribest, ’Thy melancholy friend, J. Belford!’ Melancholy!  For what?  To stand by, and see fair play between an old man and death?  I thought thou hadst been more of a man; that thou art not afraid of an acute death, a sword’s point, to be so plaugily hip’d at the consequences of a chronical one!—­What though the scarificators work upon him day by day?  It’s only upon a caput mortuum:  and pr’ythee go to, to use the stylum veterum, and learn of the royal butchers; who, for sport, (an hundred times worse men than thy Lovelace,) widow ten thousand at a brush, and make twice as many fatherless—­learn of them, I say, how to support a single death.