Dear, I am yours.

Letter 54.—­Temple has really started on his journey, and is now past Brickhill, far away in the north of England.  The journey to Ireland was made via Holyhead in those days as it is now.  It was a four days’ journey to Chester, and no good road after.  The great route through Wales to Holyhead was in such a state that in 1685 the Viceroy going to Ireland was five hours in travelling the fourteen miles from St. Asaph to Conway; between Conway and Beaumaris he walked; and his lady was carried in a litter.  A carriage was often taken to pieces at Conway, and carried to the Menai Straits on the peasants’ shoulders round the dangerous cliff of Penmaenmawr.  Mr. B. and Mr. D. remain mysterious symbolic initials of gossip and scandalmongering.  St. Gregory’s near St. Paul’s, was a church entirely destroyed by the great fire.

Sir John Tufton of “The Mote,” near Maidstone, married Mary, the third daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Lord Wotton.

    For your Master [seal with coat-of-arms],
        when your Mistress pleases.

SIR,—­You bid me write every week, and I am doing it without considering how it will come to you.  Let Nan look to that, with whom, I suppose, you have left the orders of conveyance.  I have your last letter; but Jane, to whom you refer me, is not yet come down.  On Tuesday I expect her; and if she be not engaged, I shall give her no cause hereafter to believe that she is a burden to me, though I have no employment for her but that of talking to me when I am in the humour of saying nothing.  Your dog is come too, and I have received him with all the kindness that is due to anything you send.  I have defended him from the envy and malice of a troop of greyhounds that used to be in favour with me; and he is so sensible of my care over him, that he is pleased with nobody else, and follows me as if we had been of long acquaintance.  ’Tis well you are gone past my recovery.  My heart has failed me twenty times since you went, and, had you been within my call, I had brought you back as often, though I know thirty miles’ distance and three hundred are the same thing.  You will be so kind, I am sure, as to write back by the coach and tell me what the success of your journey so far has been.  After that, I expect no more (unless you stay for a wind) till you arrive at Dublin.  I pity your sister in earnest; a sea voyage is welcome to no lady; but you are beaten to it, and ’twill become you, now you are a conductor, to show your valour and keep your company in heart.  When do you think of coming back again?  I am asking that before you are at your journey’s end.  You will not take it ill that I desire it should be soon.  In the meantime, I’ll practise all the rules you give me.  Who told you I go to bed late?  In earnest, they do me wrong:  I have been faulty in that point heretofore, I confess, but ’tis a good while since I gave it over with my reading o’ nights; but in the daytime I cannot live without it, and ’tis all my diversion, and infinitely more pleasing to me than any company but yours.  And yet I am not given to it in any excess now; I have been very much more.  ’Tis Jane, I know, tells all these tales of me.  I shall be even with her some time or other, but for the present I long for her with some impatience, that she may tell me all you have told her.