Your opinion of my eldest brother is, I think, very just, and when I said maliciously, I meant a French malice, which you know does not signify the same with an English one.  I know not whether I told it you or not, but I concluded (from what you said of your indisposition) that it was very like the spleen; but perhaps I foresaw you would not be willing to own a disease that the severe part of the world holds to be merely imaginary and affected, and therefore proper only to women.  However, I cannot but wish you had stayed longer at Epsom and drunk the waters with more order though in a less proportion.  But did you drink them immediately from the well?  I remember I was forbid it, and methought with a great deal of reason, for (especially at this time of year) the well is so low, and there is such a multitude to be served out on’t, that you can hardly get any but what is thick and troubled; and I have marked that when it stood all night (for that was my direction) the bottom of the vessel it stood in would be covered an inch thick with a white clay, which, sure, has no great virtue in’t, and is not very pleasant to drink.

What a character of a young couple you give me!  Would you would ask some one who knew him, whether he be not much more of an ass since his marriage than he was before.  I have some reason to doubt that it alters people strangely.  I made a visit t’other day to welcome a lady into this country whom her husband had newly brought down, and because I knew him, though not her, and she was a stranger here, ’twas a civility I owed them.  But you cannot imagine how I was surprised to see a man that I had known so handsome, so capable of being made a pretty gentleman (for though he was no proud philosopher, as the Frenchmen say, he was that which good company and a little knowledge of the world would have made equal to many that think themselves very well, and are thought so), transformed into the direct shape of a great boy newly come from school.  To see him wholly taken up with running on errands for his wife, and teaching her little dog tricks!  And this was the best of him; for when he was at leisure to talk, he would suffer no one else to do it, and what he said, and the noise he made, if you had heard it, you would have concluded him drunk with joy that he had a wife and a pack of hounds.  I was so weary on’t that I made haste home, and could not but think of the change all the way till my brother (who was with me) thought me sad, and so, to put me in better humour, said he believed I repented me I had not this gentleman, now I saw how absolutely his wife governed him.  But I assured him, that though I thought it very fit such as he should be governed, yet I should not like the employment by no means.  It becomes no woman, and did so ill with this lady that in my opinion it spoiled a good face and a very fine gown.  Yet the woman you met upon the way governed her husband and did it handsomely.  It was, as you say, a great example of friendship, and much for the credit of our sex.