72 THE CECILS
of a flux falling into my left eye," he writes to Essex, in July, 1597, and in October of the same year, in a letter to his son, " I am worse since my physic, being now /JLOVOTTOVS and povoxap but not monoculus." On his seventy-seventh birthday he writes, " to my verie lovyng sonne Sir Robert Cecile Kt. . . . Though my body be this very day at the period of iij xx xvij years, and therefore far unable to travel either with my body or with lively spirits, yet I find myself so bound with the superabundant kindness of her Majesty in dis- pensing with my disabilities as, God permitting me, I will be at Westminster to-morrow in the after- noon, ready to attend the lords. Your old loving father, W. Burghley."
It is a mistake to speak of Burghley being left alone and unfriended in his old age. It is true that he outlived the friends of his youth and manhood, but he was a man of strong family affec- tion a characteristic of the Cecil family and rejoiced in the company of his children and grand- children. " All your offspring are here, merry," he writes to Sir Robert from Theobalds a year before his death, and the numerous children and grandchildren of Sir Thomas Cecil were no doubt often with him. "If he could get his table set round with young little children, he was then in his kingdom," says his domestic biographer. " He was happy in most worldly things, but most happy in his children and children's children. He had his own children, grandchildren and great-grand- children ordinarily at his table, sitting about
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