when people shall ask, what ’tis I expect?  Can there be anything vainer than such a hope upon such grounds?  You must needs see the folly on’t yourself, and therefore examine your own heart what ’tis fit for me to do, and what you can do for a person you love, and that deserves your compassion if nothing else,—­a person that will always have an inviolable friendship for you, a friendship that shall take up all the room my passion held in my heart, and govern there as master, till death come and take possession and turn it out.

Why should you make an impossibility where there is none?  A thousand accidents might have taken me from you, and you must have borne it.  Why would not your own resolution work as much upon you as necessity and time does infallibly upon people?  Your father would take it very ill, I believe, if you should pretend to love me better than he did my Lady, yet she is dead and he lives, and perhaps may do to love again.  There is a gentlewoman in this country that loved so passionately for six or seven years that her friends, who kept her from marrying, fearing her death, consented to it; and within half a year her husband died, which afflicted her so strongly nobody thought she would have lived.  She saw no light but candles in three years, nor came abroad in five; and now that ’tis some nine years past, she is passionately taken again with another, and how long she has been so nobody knows but herself.  This is to let you see ’tis not impossible what I ask, nor unreasonable.  Think on’t, and attempt it at least; but do it sincerely, and do not help your passion to master you.  As you have ever loved me do this.

The carrier shall bring your letters to Suffolk House to Jones.  I shall long to hear from you; but if you should deny the only hope that’s left me, I must beg you will defer it till Christmas Day be past; for, to deal freely with you, I have some devotions to perform then, which must not be disturbed with anything, and nothing is like to do it as so sensible an affliction.  Adieu.

Letter 43.

SIR,—­I can say little more than I did,—­I am convinced of the vileness of the world and all that’s in it, and that I deceived myself extremely when I expected anything of comfort from it.  No, I have no more to do in’t but to grow every day more and more weary of it, if it be possible that I have not yet reached the highest degree of hatred for it.  But I thank God I hate nothing else but the base world, and the vices that make a part of it.  I am in perfect charity with my enemies, and have compassion for all people’s misfortunes as well as for my own, especially for those I may have caused; and I may truly say I bear my share of such.  But as nothing obliges me to relieve a person that is in extreme want till I change conditions with him and come to be where he began, and that I may be thought compassionate if I do all that I can without prejudicing myself too much, so let me tell you, that