find my heart hardened and blunt to new impressions, it will scarce receive or retain affections of yesterday; and those friends who have been dead these twenty years, are more present to me now, than these I see daily. You, dear sir, are one of the former sort to me, in all respects, but that we can, yet, correspond together. I do not know whether it is not more vexatious, to know we are both in one world, without any farther intercourse. Adieu. I can say no more, I feel so much: let me drop into common things. Lord Masham has just married his son. Mr. Lewis has just buried his wife. Lord Oxford wept over your letter in pure kindness. Mrs. B. sighs more for you, than for the loss of youth. She says she will be agreeable many years hence, for she has learned that secret from some receipts of your writing. Adieu.
MARCH 23, 1736-7.
THOUGH you were never to write to me, yet what you desired in your last, that I would write often to you, would be a very easy task: for every day I talk with you, and of you, in my heart; and I need only set down what that is thinking of. The nearer I find myself verging to that period of life which is to be labour and sorrow, the more I prop myself upon those few supports that are left
