Why, then, should such cursed qualms take him?—­Who would have thought he had been such poor blood?  Now [rot the puppy!] to see him sit silent in a corner, when he has tired himself with his mock majesty, and with his argumentation, (Who so fond of arguing as he?) and teaching his shadow to make mouths against the wainscot—­The devil fetch me if I have patience with him!

But he has had no rest for these ten days—­that’s the thing!—­You must write to him; and pr’ythee coax him, Jack, and send him what he writes for, and give him all his way—­there will be no bearing him else.  And get the lady buried as fast as you can; and don’t let him know where.

This letter should have gone yesterday.  We told him it did.  But were in hopes he would have inquired after it again.  But he raves as he has not any answer.

What he vouchsafed to read of other of your letters has given my Lord such a curiosity as makes him desire you to continue your accounts.  Pray do; but not in your hellish Arabic; and we will let the poor fellow only into what we think fitting for his present way.

I live a cursed dull poking life here.  What with I so lately saw of poor Belton, and what I now see of this charming fellow, I shall be as crazy as he soon, or as dull as thou, Jack; so must seek for better company in town than either of you.  I have been forced to read sometimes to divert me; and you know I hate reading.  It presently sets me into a fit of drowsiness; and then I yawn and stretch like a devil.

Yet in Dryden’s Palemon and Arcite have I just now met with a passage, that has in it much of our Bob.’s case.  These are some of the lines.

Mr. Mowbray then recites some lines from that poem, describing a
      distracted man, and runs the parallel; and then, priding himself
      in his performance, says: 

Let me tell you, that had I begun to write as early as you and Lovelace, I might have cut as good a figure as either of you.  Why not?  But boy or man I ever hated a book.  ’Tis folly to lie.  I loved action, my boy.  I hated droning; and have led in former days more boys from their book, than ever my master made to profit by it.  Kicking and cuffing, and orchard-robbing, were my early glory.

But I am tired of writing.  I never wrote such a long letter in my life.  My wrist and my fingers and thumb ache d——­n——­y.  The pen is an hundred weight at least.  And my eyes are ready to drop out of my head upon the paper.—­The cramp but this minute in my fingers.  Rot the goose and the goose-quill!  I will write no more long letters for a twelve-month to come.  Yet one word; we think the mad fellow coming to.  Adieu.

LETTER XXIII

Mr. Lovelace, to John Belford, Esq. 
Uxbridge, sat.  Sept. 9.

JACK,