perplexities, which I am not at liberty to explain; but they are such as
to demand all the strength of his mind, and quite exclude any attention
to foreign objects. His brother Robert (the flower of his family) hath
eloped from the persecutions of his father, and has taken shelter with
me. What the issue of his adventure will be, I know not. He hath the
sweetness of an angel in his heart, combined with admirable firmness of
purpose: an uncultivated, but very original, and, I think, superior
genius. But this step of his is but a small part of their family
troubles.

I am to blame for not writing to you before on _my own account_; but I
know you can dispense with the expressions of gratitude, or I should
have thanked you before for all May's kindness. He has liberally
supplied the person I spoke to you of with money, and had procured him a
situation just after himself had lighted upon a similar one and engaged
too far to recede. But May's kindness was the same, and my thanks to you
and him are the same. May went about on this business as if it had been
his own. But you knew John May before this: so I will be silent.

I shall be very glad to hear from you when convenient. I do not know how
your Calendar and other affairs thrive; but, above all, I have not heard
a great while of your "Madoc"--the _opus magnum_. I would willingly send
you something to give a value to this letter; but I have only one slight
passage to send you, scarce worth the sending, which I want to edge in
somewhere into my play, which, by the way, hath not received the
addition of ten lines, besides, since I saw you. A father, old Walter
Woodvil (the witch's PROTEGE) relates this of his son John, who "fought
in adverse armies," being a royalist, and his father a parliamentary
man:--