have not a better gift in courtship, he will owe my lady’s favour to his fortune rather than to his address.  My Lady Anne Wentworth I hear is marrying, but I cannot learn to whom; nor is it easy to guess who is worthy of her.  In my judgment she is, without dispute, the finest lady I know (one always excepted); not that she is at all handsome, but infinitely virtuous and discreet, of a sober and very different humour from most of the young people of these times, but has as much wit and is as good company as anybody that ever I saw.  What would you give that I had but the wit to know when to make an end of my letters?  Never anybody was persecuted with such long epistles; but you will pardon my unwillingness to leave you, and notwithstanding all your little doubts, believe that I am very much

Your faithful friend

and humble servant,

D. OSBORNE.

Letter 7.—­There seem to have been two carriers bringing letters to Dorothy at this time, Harrold and Collins; we hear something of each of them in the following letters.  Those who have seen the present-day carriers in some unawakened market-place in the Midlands,—­heavy, rumbling, two-horse cars of huge capacity, whose three miles an hour is fast becoming too sluggish for their enfranchised clients; those who have jolted over the frozen ruts of a fen road, behind their comfortable Flemish horses, and heard the gossip of the farmers and their wives, the grunts of the discontented baggage pig, and the encouraging shouts of the carrier; those, in a word, who have travelled in a Lincolnshire carrier’s cart, have, I fancy, a more correct idea of Dorothy’s postmen and their conveyances than any I could quote from authority or draw from imagination.

Lord Lisle was the son of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, and brother of the famous Algernon.  He sat in the Long Parliament for Yarmouth, in the Isle of Wight, and afterwards became a member of the Upper House.  Concerning his embassage to Sweden this is again proposed to him in September 1653, but, as we read in the minutes of the Council, “when he was desired to proceed, finding himself out of health, he desired to be excused, whereupon Council still wishing to send the embassy—­the Queen of Sweden being favourably inclined to the Commonwealth—­pitched upon Lord Whitelocke, who was willing to go.”

To Lady Sunderland and Mr. Smith there are several amusing references in these letters.  Lady Sunderland was the daughter of the Earl of Leicester, and sister of Algernon Sydney.  She was born in 1620, and at the age of nineteen married Henry Lord Spencer, who was killed in the battle of Newbury in 1642.  After her husband’s death, she retired to Brington in Northamptonshire, until, wearied with the heavy load of housekeeping, she came to live with her father and mother at Penshurst.  In the Earl of Leicester’s journal, under date Thursday, July 8th, 1652, we find:—­“My daughter Spencer was married to Sir Robert Smith at