sure, my obedience deserves they should cure me, or else they are great tyrants to very little purpose.  You cannot imagine how cruel they are to me, and yet will persuade me ’tis for my good.  I know they mean it so, and therefore say nothing on’t, I admit, and sigh to think those are not here that would be kinder to me.  But you were cruel yourself when you seemed to apprehend I might oblige you to make good your last offer.  Alack! if I could purchase the empire of the world at that rate, I should think it much too dear; and though, perhaps, I am too unhappy myself ever to make anybody else happy, yet, sure, I shall take heed that my misfortunes may not prove infectious to my friends.  You ask counsel of a person that is very little able to give it.  I cannot imagine whither you should go, since this journey is broke.  You must e’en be content to stay at home, I think, and see what will become of us, though I expect nothing of good; and, sure, you never made a truer remark in your life than that all changes are for the worse.  Will it not stay your father’s journey too?  Methinks it should.  For God’s sake write me all that you hear or can think of, that I may have something to entertain myself withal.  I have a scurvy head that will not let me write longer.

I am your.

[Directed]—­

For Mrs. Paynter, at her house
  in Bedford Street, next ye Goate,
      In Covent Garden.

Letter 21.—­Sir Thomas Osborne is Dorothy’s “Cousin Osborne” here mentioned.  He was, you remember, a suitor for Dorothy’s hand, but has now married Lady Bridget Lindsay.

The “squire that is as good as a knight,” is, in all probability, Richard Bennet.  Thomas Bennet, his father, an alderman of the city of London, had bought a seat near Cambridge, called Babraham or Babram, that had belonged to Sir Toby Palavicini.  The alderman appears to have been a loyal citizen, as he was created baronet in 1660.  His two sons, Sir Richard and Sir Thomas, married daughters of Sir Lavinius Munck;—­so we need not accuse Dorothy of irretrievably breaking hearts by her various refusals.

When Dorothy says she will “sit like the lady of the lobster, and give audience at Babram,” she simply means that she will sit among magnificent surroundings unsuited to her modest disposition.  The “lady” of a lobster is a curious-shaped substance in the head of that fish, bearing some distant resemblance to the figure of a woman.  The expression is still known to fishmongers and others, who also refer to the “Adam and Eve” in a shrimp, a kindred formation.  Curiously enough, this very phrase has completely puzzled Dr. Grosart, the learned editor of Herrick, who confesses that he can make nothing of the allusion in the following passage from The Fairie Temple:—­

“The saint to which the most he prayes,
And offers Incense Nights and Dayes,
The Lady of the Lobster is
Whose foot-pace he doth stroak and kiss.”