ity to some shipwrecked strangers
obtain the blessing of dying both at the same time. How idly I talk;
'tis because the story pleases me--none in Ovid so much. I remember I
cried when I read it. Methought they were the perfectest characters of a
contented marriage, where piety and love were all their wealth, and in
their poverty feasted the gods when rich men shut them out. I am called
away,--farewell!

Your faithful.

_Letter 49._--The beginning of this letter is lost, and with it,
perhaps, the name of Dorothy's lover who had written some verses on her
beauty. However, we have the "tag" of them, with which we must rest
content.

... 'Tis pity I cannot show you what his wit could do upon so ill a
subject, but my Lady Ruthin keeps them to abuse me withal, and has put a
tune to them that I may hear them all manner of ways; and yet I do
protest I remember nothing more of them than this lame piece,--

A stately and majestic brow,
Of force to make Protectors bow.

Indeed, if I have any stately looks I think he has seen them, but yet it
seems they could not keep him from playing the fool. My Lady Grey told
me that one day talking of me to her (as he would find ways to bring in
that discourse by the head and shoulders, whatsoever anybody else could
interpose), he said he wondered I did not marry. She (that understood
him well enough, but would not seem to do so) said she knew not, unless
it were that I liked my present condition so well that I did not care to
change it; which she was apt to believe, because to her knowledge I had
refused very good fortunes, and named some so far beyond his reach, that
she thought she had dashed all his hopes. But he, confident still, said
'twas perhaps that I had no fancy to their persons (as if his own were
so taking), that I was to be looked upon as one that had it in my power
to please myself, and that perhaps in a person I liked would bate
something of fortune. To this my Lady answered again for me, that 'twas
not impossible but I might do so, but in that point she thought me nice
and curious enough. And still to dishearten him the more, she took
occasion (upon his naming some gentlemen of the county that had been
talked of heretofore as of my servants, and are since disposed of) to
say (very plainly) that 'twas true they had some of them pretended, but
there was an end of my Bedfordshire servants she was sure there were no
more that could be admitted into the n