he so perfectly complied that ’tis hard to judge which humour he is more inclined to in himself; perhaps to neither, which makes it so much the more strange.  His kindness to his first wife may give him an esteem for her sister; but he was too much smitten with this lady to think of marrying anybody else, and, seriously, I could not blame him, for she had, and has yet, great loveliness in her; she was very handsome, and is very good (one may read it in her face at first sight).  A woman that is hugely civil to all people, and takes as generally as anybody that I know, but not more than my cousin Molle’s letters do, but which, yet, you do not like, you say, nor I neither, I’ll swear; and if it be ignorance in us both we’ll forgive it one another.  In my opinion these great scholars are not the best writers (of letters, I mean); of books, perhaps they are.  I never had, I think, but one letter from Sir Justinian, but ’twas worth twenty of anybody’s else to make me sport.  It was the most sublime nonsense that in my life I ever read; and yet, I believe, he descended as low as he could to come near my weak understanding.  ’Twill be no compliment after this to say I like your letters in themselves; not as they come from one that is not indifferent to me, but, seriously, I do.  All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one’s discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.  ’Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find out terms that may obscure a plain sense.  Like a gentleman I know, who would never say “the weather grew cold,” but that “winter began to salute us.”  I have no patience for such coxcombs, and cannot blame an old uncle of mine that threw the standish at his man’s head because he writ a letter for him where, instead of saying (as his master bid him), “that he would have writ himself, but he had the gout in his hand,” he said, “that the gout in his hand would not permit him to put pen to paper.”  The fellow thought he had mended it mightily, and that putting pen to paper was much better than plain writing.

I have no patience neither for these translations of romances.  I met with Polexander and L’illustre Bassa both so disguised that I, who am their old acquaintance, hardly know them; besides that, they were still so much French in words and phrases that ’twas impossible for one that understands not French to make anything of them.  If poor Prazimene be in the same dress, I would not see her for the world.  She has suffered enough besides.  I never saw but four tomes of her, and was told the gentleman that writ her story died when those were finished.  I was very sorry for it, I remember, for I liked so far as I had seen of it extremely.  Is it not my good Lord of Monmouth, or some such honourable personage, that presents her to the English ladies?  I have heard many people wonder how he spends his estate.  I believe he undoes himself with printing his translations.  Nobody else will undergo the charge, because they never hope to sell enough of them to pay themselves withal.  I was looking t’other day in a book of his where he translates Pipero as piper, and twenty words more that are as false as this.