confined to the common people, who are more constant than those we miscal their betters. I walk the streets, and so do my lower friends, from whom and from whom alone, I have a thousand hats and blessings upon old scores, which those we call the gentry have forgot. But I have not the love, or hardly the civility, of any one man in power or station; and I can boast that I neither visit or am acquainted with any lord temporal or spiritual in the whole kingdom; nor am able to do the least good office to the most deserving man, except what I can dispose of in my own cathedral upon a vacancy. What has sunk my spirits more than even years and sickness, is, reflecting on the most execrable corruptions that run through every branch of publick management.
I heartily thank you for those lines translated, Singula de nobis anni[1], &c. You have put them in a strong and admirable light; but however I am so partial, as to be more delighted with those which are to do me the greatest honour I shall ever receive from posterity, and will outweigh the malignity of ten thousand enemies. I never saw them before, by which it is plain that the letter you sent me miscarried. — I do not doubt that you have choice of new acquaintance, and some of them may be deserving: for, youth is the season of virtue: corruptions grow with years, and I believe the oldest rogue in England is the greatest. You have years enough before you to watch whether these new acquaintance will keep their virtue when they leave you and go
- ↑ The circling years on human pleasures prey,
They steal my humour and my mirth away.
into
