so possessed with it as to consent he should be employed
in such a commission.

Your opinion of my eldest brother is, I think, very just, and when I
said maliciously, I meant a French malice, which you know does not
signify the same with an English one. I know not whether I told it you
or not, but I concluded (from what you said of your indisposition) that
it was very like the spleen; but perhaps I foresaw you would not be
willing to own a disease that the severe part of the world holds to be
merely imaginary and affected, and therefore proper only to women.
However, I cannot but wish you had stayed longer at Epsom and drunk the
waters with more order though in a less proportion. But did you drink
them immediately from the well? I remember I was forbid it, and
methought with a great deal of reason, for (especially at this time of
year) the well is so low, and there is such a multitude to be served out
on't, that you can hardly get any but what is thick and troubled; and I
have marked that when it stood all night (for that was my direction) the
bottom of the vessel it stood in would be covered an inch thick with a
white clay, which, sure, has no great virtue in't, and is not very
pleasant to drink.

What a character of a young couple you give me! Would you would ask some
one who knew him, whether he be not much more of an ass since his
marriage than he was before. I have some reason to doubt that it alters
people strangely. I made a visit t'other day to welcome a lady into this
country whom her husband had newly brought down, and because I knew him,
though not her, and she was a stranger here, 'twas a civility I owed
them. But you cannot imagine how I was surprised to see a man that I had
known so handsome, so capable of being made a pretty gentleman (for
though he was no proud philosopher, as the Frenchmen say, he was that
which good company and a little knowledge of the world would have made
equal to many that think themselves very well, and are thought so),
transformed into the direct shape of a great boy newly come from school.
To see him wholly taken up with running on errands for his wife, and
teaching her little dog tricks! And this was the best of him; for when
he was at leisure to talk, he would suffer no one else to do it, and
what he said, and the noise he made, if you had heard it, you would have
concluded him drunk with joy that he had a wife and a pack of hounds. I
was so weary on't that I made haste home,