gation being, that you should receive twelve shirts, which number shall be completed by the first proper occasion. Your kind letter, however, is extremely seasonable; and (next to a note from the treasury) has proved the most vivifying cordial in the world. If you please to send me now and then as much of the same as will lie upon the top of your pen, I should be contented to take sheets for shirts to the end of the chapter.
Since you are so good as to enter into my affairs, I shall trouble you with a detail of them, as well as of my conduct since I left England; which, in my opinion, you have a right to inspect, and approve or condemn, as you think fit. During my state of probation with the earl of Strafford, it was my endeavour to recommend myself to his excellency rather by fidelity, silence, and an entire submission, than by an affectation to shine in his service: And whatever difficulties, whatever discouragements fell
educated at Queen's College, in Oxford, where he took the degree of master of arts, December 15, 1705. Mr. Tickell, who was of the same college, in his poem to his excellency the lord privy seal, on the prospect of peace, pays a compliment to his friend Mr. Harrison, in these lines:
"That much lov'd youth, whom Utrecht's walls confine,
To Bristol's praises shall his Strafford's join."
The reader will find some circumstances relating to him and his last sickness in Dr. Swift's letter, or journal, written to Mrs. Dingley, beginning January 25, 1712-13, by which it appears, that Mr. Harrison coming over to England from Utrecht with the barrier treaty, died on February 14, 1712-13. Mr. Jacob, in his lives and characters of all the English poets, vol. I, p. 70, has committed two mistakes, in calling him William instead of Thomas, and in saying, that he died in Holland in 1713. He mentions among Mr. Harrison's works, Woodstock Park, inscribed to the lord chancellor Cowper.
