all joining in opinion. If this be disaffection, pray God send me always among the disaffected! and I heartily wish you joy of your scurvy treatment at court, which has given you leisure to cultivate both publick and private virtue; neither of them likely to be soon met within the walls of St. James's or Westminster. But I must here dismiss you, that I may pay my acknowledgments to the duke for the great honour he has done me.
MY LORD,
I could have sworn that my pride would be always able to preserve me from vanity; of which I have been in great danger to be guilty for some months past, first by the conduct of my lady duchess, and now by that of your grace, which had like to finish the work: and I should have certainly gone about showing my letters under the charge of secrecy to every blab of my acquaintance, if I could have the least hope of prevailing on any of them to believe that a man in so obscure a corner, quite thrown out of the present world, and within a few steps of the next, should receive such condescending invitations, from two such persons, to whom he is an utter stranger, and who know no more of him than what they have heard by the partial representations of a friend. But in the mean time, I must desire your grace not to flatter yourself, that I waited for your consent to accept the invitation. I must be ignorant indeed not to know, that the duchess, ever since you met, has been most politickly employed in increasing those forces, and sharpening those arms with which she subdued you at first, and to which, the braver and the wiser you grow, you will more and more
submit.
