will forgive me for saying this, but I fear God will scarce forgive me for desiring it.

Is there no other ex

infant in

Make me less wicked then. pedient to return you and your peace to the bosom of your country? I hear you are going to Hanover; can there be no favourable planet at this conjuncture, or do you only come back so far to die twice? Is Eurydice once more snatched to the shades? If ever mortal had reason to hate the king, it is I; for it is my particular misfortune to be almost the only innocent man whom he has made to suffer, both by his government at home, and his negociations abroad.

LETTER V.

TO THE SAME.

THE more I examine my own mind, the more romantic I find myself. Methinks it is a noble spirit of contradiction to fate and fortune, not to give up those that are snatched from us, but follow them with warmer zeal, the farther they are removed from the sense of it. Sure flattery never travelled so far as three thousand miles; it is now only for truth, which overtakes all things, to reach you at this distance. 'Tis a generous piece of popery that pursues even those who are to be eternally absent, into another world; let it be right or wrong, the very extravagance is a sort of piety. I cannot be satisfied with strewing flowers over you, and barely honouring you

as a thing lost; but must consider you as a glorious, though remote being, and be sending addresses and prayers after you. You have carried away so much of my esteem, that what remains of it is daily languishing and dying over my acquaintance here: and I believe, in three or four months more, I shall think Aurat-bassar as good a place as Covent-Garden. You may imagine this but raillery, but I am really so far gone as to take pleasure in reveries of this kind. Let them say I am romantic, so is every one said to be that either admires a fine thing, or praises one; 'tis no wonder such people are thought mad, for they are as much out of the way of common understanding as if they were mad, because they are in the right. On my conscience, as the world goes, 'tis never worth any body's while to do a noble thing for the honour of it; glory, the only pay of generous actions, is now as ill paid as other just debts are; and neither Mrs. Macfarland for immolating her lover, nor Lady Mary for sacrificing herself, must hope to be ever compared with Lucretia or Portia.

I write this in some anger; for having frequented those people most, since you went, who seemed most in your favour, I heard nothing that concerned you talked of so often, as that you went away in a black full-bottom; which I did not assert to be a bob, and was answered,—Love is blind. I am persuaded your wig had never suffered this criticism, but on the score of your head, and the two fine eyes that are in it.

For God's sake, Madam, when you write to me, talk of yourself, there is nothing I so much desire to hear of talk a great deal of yourself, that she who I

always thought talked best, may speak upon the best subject. The shrines and reliques you tell me of, no way engage my curiosity; I had ten times rather go on pilgrimage to see your face, than St. John Baptist's head: I wish you had not only all those fine statues you talk of, but even the golden image which Nebuchadnezzar set up, provided you were to travel no further than you could carry it.

The court of Vienna is really very edifying: the ladies, with respect to their husbands, seem to understand that text very literally, that commands us to bear one another's burthens: but I fancy many a man there is, like Issachar, an ass between two burthens. I shall look upon you no longer as a Christian, when you pass from that charitable court to the land of jealousy, where the unhappy women converse with none but eunuchs, and where the very cucumbers are brought to them cut. I expect to hear an exact account how, and what places, you leave one article of faith after another, as you approach nearer to Turkey. Pray how far are you gone already? Amidst the charms of high-mass, and the ravishing trills of a Sunday-opera, what think you of the doctrine and discipline of the church of England? have you from your heart a reverence for Sternhold and Hopkins? How do your Christian virtues hold out in so long a voyage? You have already (without passing the bounds of Christendom) out-travelled the sin of fornication, and are happily arrived at the free region of adultery in a little time you'll look upon some other sins, with more impartiality than the ladies here are capable of. I reckon you'll time it so well

as to make your faith serve out just to the last verge of Christendom; that you may discharge your chaplain (as humanity requires) in a place where he may find some business, and not be out of the way of all trade.

I doubt not but I shall be told (when I come to follow you through those countries) in how pretty a manner you accommodated yourself to the customs of the true believers. At this town, they will say, she practised to sit on the sofa; at that village she learnt to fold the turban; here she was bathed and anointed; and there she parted with her black fullbottom: at every Christian virtue you lost, and at every Christian habit you quitted, it will be decent for me to fetch a holy sigh; but still I shall proceed to follow you. How happy will it be, for a gay young woman, to live in a country where it is a part of religious worship to be giddy-headed! I shall hear at Belgrade, how the good basha received the fair convert with tears of joy; how he was charmed with her pretty manner of pronouncing the words Allah and Muhammed; and how earnestly you joined with him in exhorting Mr. Wortley to be circumcised; but he satisfies you by demonstrating, how, in that condition, he could not properly represent his Britannic majesty. Lastly, I shall hear, how, the very first night you lay at Pera, you had a vision of Mahomet's paradise, and happily awaked without a soul; from which blessed instant, the beautiful body was left to perform all the agreeable functions it was made for. But if my fate be such, that this body of mine (which is as ill matched to my mind as any

wife to her husband) be left behind in the journey, let the epitaph of Tibullus be set over it:

Hic jacet immiti consumptus morte Tibullus,
Messalam, terra, dum sequiturque, mari.

Here, stopt by hasty death, Alexis lies,

Who crost half Europe, led by Wortley's eyes.

I shall at least be sure to meet you in the next world, if there be any truth in our new doctrine of the day of judgment. Since your body is so full of fire, and capable of such solar motions as your letter describes, your soul can never be long going to the fixed stars, where I intend to settle; or else you may find me in the milky way; because Fontenelle assures us, the stars are so crowded there, that a man may stand upon one and talk to his friend on another. From thence, with a good telescope, what do you think one should take such a place as this world for? I fancy, for the devil's rookery, where the inhabitants are ready to deafen and destroy one another with eternal noise and hunger.

I see I have done in this letter, as I have often done

in your conversation, talked myself into a good humour, though I begun in an ill one: the mere pleasure of addressing you makes me run on, and it is in your own power to shorten this letter by giving over where you please, so I'll make it no longer by apologies.

The rapidity of your journeys is what I have been imitating, though in a less sphere: I have been at York and at Bath in less than a fortnight; all that time, your letter (for which you have a thousand thanks from me) lay in London; I had just before