if you please (Madam), let it not be women, for, to say truth, it is a diet I cannot yet relish, otherwise than men do that on which they surfeited last.
J.S.
IV
Madam,
Before this instant I did not believe Warwickshire the other world, or that Milcot walks had been the blessed shades. At my arrival here I am saluted by all as risen from the dead, and have had joy given me preposterously and as impertinently as they give it to men who marry where they do not love. If I should now die in earnest, my friends have nothing to pay me, for they have discharged the rites of funeral sorrow beforehand. Nor do I take it ill that report, which made Richard the Second alive so often after he was dead, should kill me as often when I am alive. The advantage is on my side. The only quarrel I have is, that they have made use of the whole Book of Martyrs upon me; and without all question, the first Christians under the great persecutions suffered not in 500 years so many several ways as I have done in six days in this lewd town. This (Madam) may seem strange unto you now, who know the company I was in; and certainly, if at that time I had departed this transitory world, it had been a way they had never thought on; and this epitaph of the Spaniard's (changing the names) would better have become my gravestone than any other my friends the poets would have found out for me:
Epitaph.
Here lies Don Alonzo,
Slain by a wound received under
His left Pap,
The Orifice of which was so
Small, no Chirurgeon could
Discover it.
Reader,
If thou wouldst avoid so strange
A Death,
Look not upon Lucinda's eyes.
Now all this discourse of dying (Madam) is but to let you know how dangerous a thing it is to be long from London, especially in a place which is concluded out of the world. If
