We shall all here miss the wild fellow.  To be sure, there is no man better company when he pleases.

Pray, do you never travel thirty or forty miles?  I should be glad to see you here at M. Hall.  It will be charity when my kinsman is gone; for we suppose you will be his chief correspondent; although he has promised to write to my nieces often.  But he is very apt to forget his promises; to us his relations particularly.  God preserve us all; Amen! prays

Your very humble servant,
M.

LETTER LII

Mr. Belford, to Lord M.
London, Tuesday night, Oct. 3.

MY LORD,

I obey your Lordship’s commands with great pleasure.

Yesterday in the afternoon Mr. Lovelace made me a visit at my lodgings.  As I was in expectation of one from Colonel Morden about the same time, I thought proper to carry him to a tavern which neither of us frequented, (on pretence of a half-appointment;) ordering notice to be sent me thither, if the Colonel came; and Mr. Lovelace sent to Mowbray, and Tourville, and Mr. Doleman of Uxbridge, (who came to town to take leave of him,) to let them know where to find us.

Mr. Lovelace is too well recovered, I was going to say.  I never saw him more gay, lively, and handsome.  We had a good deal of bluster about some parts of the trust I had engaged in; and upon freedoms I had treated him with; in which, he would have it, that I had exceeded our agreed-upon limits; but on the arrival of our three old companions, and a nephew of Mr. Doleman’s, (who had a good while been desirous to pass an hour with Mr. Lovelace,) it blew off for the present.

Mr. Mowbray and Mr. Tourville had also taken some exceptions at the freedoms of my pen; and Mr. Lovelace, after his way, took upon him to reconcile us; and did it at the expense of all three; and with such an infinite run of humour and raillery, that we had nothing to do but to laugh at what he said, and at one another.  I can deal tolerably with him at my pen; but in conversation he has no equal.  In short, it was his day.  He was glad, he said, to find himself alive; and his two friends, clapping and rubbing their hands twenty times in an hour, declared, that now, once more, he was all himself—­the charming’st fellow in the world; and they would follow him to the farthest part of the globe.

I threw a bur upon his coat now-and-then; but none would stick.

Your Lordship knows, that there are many things which occasion a roar of applause in conversation, when the heart is open, and men are resolved to be merry, which will neither bear repeating, nor thinking of afterwards.  Common things, in the mouth of a man we admire, and whose wit has passed upon us for sterling, become, in a gay hour, uncommon.  We watch every turn of such a one’s countenance, and are resolved to laugh when he smiles, even before he utters what we are expecting to flow from his lips.