much satisfaction."... She was an extraordinary wit as well as beauty.'[1]
Some bantering lines, signed 'Dorothy Anwacker,' thus allude to his marriage: —
'Petty complains that nature was unkind,
In that she made him heavy-eyed and blind,
Never considering that the mighty three,
Fortune, Love, Justice, were more blind than he.
'The Blind were all his friends, for understand,
It was blind fortune gave him all his land.
Blind love, in her he had gave him a wife,
Rich, fair, and civil, without brand or strife.'[2]
'This is the fourth day,' Sir William writes from Dublin, in the autumn of 1667, to Captain Graunt, 'since my wife's arrival in the town, and I thank God that her presence and conversation have been a continual holy day unto me; so as I have declined all other business till this time, the better to entertain her.' 'I am almost weary of living,' he says a few weeks later, 'did not my wife, as she is at this moment doing, refresh me with the lute strings, to which purpose I am contented that our dreadful account should be inflamed with two packets of lute strings, which will cost about 17 or 18 shillings.'[3]
The following letter gives an insight into the troubles of furnishing in 1668: —
Sir William to Lady Petty.
'I have sent an inventory of such goods as we have. Consider what you have of your own, and then consider also what more is next necessary to be bought, to the value of about 300l.; whereof a good part must be in linen; as also a pair of horses, about 50l.; with another pair, about 60l.; and a pair for loading, to make them up to six. I suppose we may have them here, either bays or blacks. The great art will be in buying these horses, next to the finding means to pay for them.'[4]
