He took, therefore, a pretty and convenient house, and sent for what, next to his lovely wife, he most valued, his books; and when they came, and when she herself was coming, he revived in his hopes and spirits, and hastened her approach by the following affectionate rhymes—they must not, in these fastidious days, be called verses. The austere critic is besought, therefore, not to fall on the fair fame of the writer, by considering them as produced for public inspection; nor as assuming the high present character of poetry. They are inserted only biographically, from a dearth of any further prose document, by which might be conveyed, in the simplicity of his own veracious diction, some idea of the sympathy and the purity of his marriage happiness, by the rare picture which these lines present of an intellectual lover in a tender husband.
“To Mrs. Burney.
“Lynn Regis.
“Come, my darling!—quit the town;
Come!—and me with rapture crown.
If ’tis meet to fee or bribe
A leech of th’ Æsculapius tribe,
We Hepburn have, who’s wise as Socrates,
And deep in physic as Hippocrates.