LETTERS
I
Fortune and Love have ever been so incompatible, that it is no wonder (Madam) if, having had so much of the one for you, I have ever found so little of the other for myself. Coming to town (and having rid as if I had brought intelligence of a new-landed enemy to the State), I find you gone the day before, and with you (Madam) all that is considerable upon the place; for, though you have left behind you faces whose beauties might well excuse perjury in others, yet in me they cannot, since, to the making that no sin, Love's casuists have most rationally resolved that she for whom we forsake ought to be handsomer than the forsaken, which would be here impossible. So that now a gallery, hung with Titian's or Vandike's hand, and a chamber filled with living excellence, are the same things to me; and the use that I shall make of that sex now will be no other than that which the wiser sort of Catholiques do of pictures—at the highest, they but serve to raise my devotion to you. Should a great beauty now resolve to take me in (as that is all they think belongs to it) with the artillery of her eyes, it would be as vain as for a thief to set upon a new-robbed passenger. You (Madam) have my heart already; nor can you use it unkindly but with some injustice, since (besides that it left a good service to wait on you) it was never known to stay so long or so willingly before with any. After all, the wages will not be high, for it hath been brought up under Platonicks, and knows no other way of being paid for service than by being commanded more; which truth when you doubt, you have but to send to its master and
J.S.
II
A Dissuasion from Love
Jack,
Though your disease be in the number of those that are better cured with time than precept, yet, since it is lawful for every man to practise upon them that are forsaken and given over (which I take to be your state), I will adventure to
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