lived according to its Laws.  As we know no more of the next Life, but that it will be an happy one to the Good, and miserable to the Wicked, why may we not please ourselves at least, to alleviate the Difficulty of resigning this Being, in imagining that we shall have a Sense of what passes below, and may possibly be employed in guiding the Steps of those with whom we walked with Innocence when mortal?  Why may not I hope to go on in my usual Work, and, tho unknown to you, be assistant in all the Conflicts of your Mind?  Give me leave to say to you, O best of Men, that I cannot figure to myself a greater Happiness than in such an Employment:  To be present at all the Adventures to which human Life is exposed, to administer Slumber to thy Eyelids in the Agonies of a Fever, to cover thy beloved Face in the Day of Battle, to go with thee a Guardian Angel incapable of Wound or Pain, where I have longed to attend thee when a weak, a fearful Woman:  These, my Dear, are the Thoughts with which I warm my poor languid Heart; but indeed I am not capable under my present Weakness of bearing the strong Agonies of Mind I fall into, when I form to myself the Grief you will be in upon your first hearing of my Departure.  I will not dwell upon this, because your kind and generous Heart will be but the more afflicted, the more the Person for whom you lament offers you Consolation.  My last Breath will, if I am my self, expire in a Prayer for you.  I shall never see thy Face again.

  Farewell for ever.  T.

[Footnote 1:  Saudades.  To have saudades of anything is to yearn with desire towards it.  Saudades da Patria is home sickness.  To say Tenho Saudades without naming an object would be taken to mean I am all yearning to call a certain gentleman or lady mine.]

[Footnote 2:  In Act I. sc. 3, of Congreve’s Way of the World, Mirabell says of Millamant,

I like her with all her faults, nay, like her for her faults.  Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her; and those affectations which in another woman would be odious, serve but to make her more agreeable.  Ill tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence, that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings; I studied em and got em by rote.  The Catalogue was so large, that I was not without hopes one day or other to hate her heartily:  to which end I so used myself to think of em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance; till in a few days it became habitual to me to remember em without being displeased.  They are now grown as familiar to me as my own frailties; and, in all probability, in a little time longer I shall like em as well.]

[Footnote 3:  The name was commonly believed to be Rivers, when this Paper was published.]

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No. 205.  Thursday, October 25, 1711.  Addison.