I humbly thank you for your offer of your head; but if you were an emperor, I should not be so bold with you as to claim your promise; you might find twenty better employments for’t.  Only with your gracious leave, I think I should be a little exalted with remembering that you had been once my friend; ’twould more endanger growing proud than being Sir Justinian’s mistress, and yet he thought me pretty well inclin’d to’t then.  Lord! what would I give that I had a Latin letter of his for you, that he writ to a great friend at Oxford, where he gives him a long and learned character of me; ’twould serve you to laugh at this seven years.  If I remember what was told me on’t, the worst of my faults was a height (he would not call it pride) that was, as he had heard, the humour of my family; and the best of my commendations was, that I was capable of being company and conversation for him.  But you do not tell me yet how you found him out.  If I had gone about to conceal him, I had been sweetly serv’d.  I shall take heed of you hereafter; because there is no very great likelihood of your being an emperor, or that, if you were, I should have your head.

I have sent into Italy for seals; ’tis to be hoped by that time mine come over, they may be of fashion again, for ’tis an humour that your old acquaintance Mr. Smith and his lady have brought up; they say she wears twenty strung upon a ribbon, like the nuts boys play withal, and I do not hear of anything else.  Mr. Howard presented his mistress but a dozen such seals as are not to be valued as times now go.  But a propos of Monsr.  Smith, what a scape has he made of my Lady Barbury; and who would e’er have dreamt he should have had my Lady Sunderland, though he be a very fine gentleman, and does more than deserve her.  I think I shall never forgive her one thing she said of him, which was that she married him out of pity; it was the pitifullest saying that ever I heard, and made him so contemptible that I should not have married him for that reason.  This is a strange letter, sure, I have not time to read it over, but I have said anything that came into my head to put you out of your dumps.  For God’s sake be in better humour, and assure yourself I am as much as you can wish,

Your faithful friend and servant.

Letter 8.—­The name of Algernon Sydney occurs more than once in these pages, and it is therefore only right to remind the reader of some of the leading facts in his life.  He was born in 1622, and was the second son of Robert Earl of Leicester.  He was educated in Paris and Italy, and first served in the army in Ireland.  On his recall to England he espoused the popular cause, and fought on that side in the battle of Marston Moor.  In 1651 he was elected a member of the Council of State, and in this situation he continued to act until 1653.  It is unnecessary to mention his republican sympathies, and after the dismissal of the Parliament, his future actions concern us but little.  He was arrested, tried, and executed in 1683, on the pretence of being concerned in the Rye House Plot.