hope you'll see it in your return. If I but knew you intended it, I'd meet you there, and travel back with you. I would fain behold the best and brightest thing I know, in the scene of ancient virtue and glory; I would fain see how you look, on the very spot where Curtius sacrificed himself for his country; and observe what difference there would be in your eyes, when you ogled the stature of Julius Cæsar, and a Marcus Aurelius. Allow me but to sneak after you in your train, to fill my pockets with coins, or to lug an old busto behind you, and I shall be proud beyond expression. Let people think, if they will, that I did all this for the pleasure of treading on classic ground; I would whisper other reasons in your ear. The joy of following your footsteps would as soon carry me to Mecca as to Rome; and let me tell you as a friend, if you are really disposed to embrace the Mahometan religion, I'll fly on pilgrimage with you thither, with as good a heart, and as sound devotion, as ever Jeffery Rudel, the Provençal poet, went after the fine Countess of Tripoly to Jerusalem. If you never heard of this Jeffery, I'll assure you he deserves your acquaintance. He lived in our Richard the First's time; put on a pilgrim's weed, took his voyage, and when he got ashore was just upon the point of expiring. The Countess of Tripoly came to the ship, took him by the hand; he lifted eyes, said he had been blest with a sight of her, he was satisfied, and so departed this life. What did the Countess of Tripoly upon this? She made him a splendid funeral; built him a tomb of porphyry; put his epitaph upon it in Arabic verse; had his sonnets

his

up

curiously copied out, and illumined with letters of gold; was taken with melancholy, and turned nun. All this, Madam, you may depend upon for a truth, and I send it to you in the very words of my author.

I don't expect all this should be punctually copied on either side, but methinks something like it is done already. The letters of gold, and the curious illumining of the sonnets, was not a greater token of respect than what I have paid to your eclogues : they lie inclosed in a monument of red Turkey, written in my fairest hand; the gilded leaves are opened with no less veneration than the pages of the sybils; like them, locked up and concealed from all prophane eyes; none but my own have beheld these sacred remains of yourself, and I should think it as great a wickedness to divulge them as to scatter abroad the ashes of my ancestors. As for the rest, if I have not followed you to the ends of the earth, 'tis not my fault; if I had, I might possibly have died as gloriously as Jeffery Rudel; and if I had so died, you might probably have done every thing for me that the Countess of Tripoly did, except turning nun.

But since our romance is like to have a more fortunate conclusion, I desire you to take another course to express your favour towards me; I mean by bringing over the fair Circassian we used to talk of. I was serious in that request, and will prove it by paying for her, if you will lay out my money so well for me. The thing shall be as secret as you please, and the lady made another half of me, that is, both my mistress and my servant, as I am both my own

servant and my own master. But I beg you to look oftener than you use to do in your glass, in order to chuse me one I may like. If you have any regard to my happiness, let there be something as near as possible to that face; but, if you please, the colours a little less vivid, the eyes a little less bright (such as reflection will shew 'em); in short, let her be such an one as you seem in your own eyes, that is, a good deal less amiable than you are. Take care of this, if you have any regard to my quiet; for otherwise, instead of being her master, I must be only her slave.

I cannot end this letter without asking, if you have received a box of books, together with letters from Mr. Congreve and myself? It was directed to Mr. Wortley at Constantinople, by a merchant-ship that set sail last June. Mr. Congreve, in fits of the gout, remembers you. Dr. Garth makes epigrams in prose when he speaks of you. Sir Robert Rich's lady loves you, though Sir Robert admires you. Mr. Craggs commemorates you with honour, the Duke of Buckingham with praise, I myself with something more. When people speak most highly of you, I think them sparing; when I try myself to speak of you, I think I am cold and stupid. I think my letters have nothing in 'em, but I am sure my heart has so much, that I am vexed to find no better name for your friend and admirer, than

Your friend and admirer.

LETTER III.

TO THE SAME.

MADAM,

AFTER having dreamed of you several nights, besides a hundred reveries by day, I find it necessary to relieve myself by writing; though this is the fourth letter I have sent, two by Mr. Methuen, and one by Lord James Hay, who was to be your convoy from Leghorn. In all I can say, I only make you a present in many words of what can do you no manner of good, but only raises my own opinion of myself, -all the good wishes and hearty dispositions I am capable of forming or feeling for a deserving object; but mine are indeed so warm, that I fear they can proceed from nothing but what I can't very decently own to you, much less to any other; yet what if a man has, he can't help it.

For God's sake, Madam, let not my correspondence be like a traffic with the grave, from whence there is no return. Unless you write to me, my wishes must be like a poor papist's devotions to separate spirits, who, for all they know or hear from them, either may or may not be sensible of their addresses. None but your guardian angels can have you more constantly in mind than I; and if they have, it is only because they can see you always. If ever you think of those fine young beaus of Heaven, I beg you to reflect, that you have just as much consolation from them as I at present have from you.

While all people here are exercising their speculations upon the affairs of the Turks, I am only considering them as they may concern a particular person; and instead of forming prospects of the general tranquillity of Europe, am hoping for some effect that may contribute to your greater ease: above all, I would fain indulge an imagination, that the nearer view of the unquiet scene you are approaching to may put a stop to your farther progress. I can hardly yet relinquish a faint hope I have ever had, that Providence will take some uncommon care of one who so generously gives herself up to it; and I can't imagine God Almighty so like some of his vice-gerents, as absolutely to neglect those who surrender to his mercy. May I thus tell you the truth of my heart? or must I put on a more unconcerned person, and tell you gaily, that there is some difference between the court of Vienna and the camps in Hungary; that scarce a basha living is so offensive a creature as Count Volkra; that the wives of ambassadors are as subject to human accidents, and as tender as their skins; that it is not more natural for glass to cut, than for Turks and Tartars to plunder (not to mention ravishing, against which I am told beauty is no defence in those parts); that you are strangely in the wrong to forsake a nation that but last year toasted Mrs. Walpole, for one that has no taste of beauty after twenty, and where the finest woman in England will be almost superannuated? Would to God, Madam, all this might move either Mr. Wortley or you; and that I may soon apply to you both what I have read in one of Harlequin's co