Sir, your, &c.
FOOTNOTES:
[98] Some 400 pages from and to him in the most compendious edition.
[99] He thought, writing to Lord Spencer about 1690, that we have "few tolerable letters of our own country" excepting—and that only in a fashion—those of Bacon, Donne and Howell.
[100] "Odorumque canum vis—as Lucretius expresses it"—perhaps requires a note. Evelyn ought to have known his Lucretius, the first book of which he translated and which he was only prevented from completing by some foolish scruples which Jeremy Taylor wisely but vainly combated. And Lucretius is fond of vis as meaning "quality" or "faculty." But Evelyn almost certainly was thinking also, more or less, of Virgil's "odora canum vis," Aen. iv. 132.
DOROTHY OSBORNE (1627-1695)
This very delightful lady—who became the wife of Sir William Temple, famous in political and literary history, and, by so doing or being, mistress of the household in which Swift lived, suffered, but met Stella—was the daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, one of the stoutest of Royalists who, as Governor of Guernsey, held its Castle Cornet for years against the rebels. Whether she was (in 1627) born there—her father had been made Lieutenant Governor six years earlier—is not known and has been thought unlikely: but the present writer (who has danced, and played whist within its walls) hopes she was. When we come to know her she was living at Chicksands in Bedfordshire and hoping to marry Temple, though the course of love ran by no means smooth. Attention was first drawn to her letters, and some of them were partly printed, in Courtenay's Life of her husband—a book which was reviewed by Macaulay in a famous essay, not overlooking Dorothy. But as a body, they waited till some half century later, when they were published by Judge Parry and received with joy by all fit folk. They were written between 1652 and 1654. The first passage is in her pleasant mood and touches on a subject—aviation—which interested that day and interests this. The second strikes some people as one of the most charming specimens of the love-letter—written neither in the violent delight that has violent end, nor in namby-pamby fashion.[101]