Constance Sherwood: An Autobiography of the Sixteenth CenturyFullerton, Georgiana
History
Constance Sherwood: An Autobiography of the Sixteenth Century
Fullerton, Georgiana
Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction
"DEAR CHILDREN,--This is the last letter that ever I think to write
to you; and therefore, if you loved me, or that you will seem
grateful to me for the special love that I have ever borne unto you,
then remember and follow these my last lessons. Oh, Philip, serve
and fear God, above all things. I find the fault in myself, that I
have (God forgive me!) been too negligent in this point. Love and
make much of your wife; for therein, considering the great adversity
you are now in, by reason of my fall, is your greatest present
comfort and relief, beside your happiness in having a wife which is
endued with so great towardness in virtue and good qualities, and in
person comparable with the best sort. Follow these two lessons, and
God will bless you; and without these, as you may see by divers
examples out of the Scripture, and also by ordinary worldly proof,
where God is not feared, all goeth to wreck; and where love is not
between the husband and wife, there God doth not prosper. My third
lesson is, that you show yourself loving and natural to your
brothers and sister and sister-in-law. Though you be very young in
years, yet you must strive with consideration to become a man; for
it is your own presence and good government of yourself that must
get friends; and if you take that course, then have I been so
careful a father unto you, as I have taken such order as you, by
God's grace, shall be well able, beside your wife's lands, to
maintain yourself like a gentleman. Marry! the world is greedy and
covetous; and if the show of the well government of yourself do not
fear and restrain their greedy appetite, it is like that, by
undirect means, they will either put you from that which law layeth
upon you, or else drive you to much trouble in trying and holding
your right. When my grandfather died, I was not much above a year
elder than you are now; and yet, I thank God, I took such order with
myself, as you shall reap the commodity of my so long passed travel,
if you do now imitate the like. Help to strengthen your young and
raw years with good counsel. I send you herewith a brief schedule,
whom I wish you to make account of as friends, and whom as servants;
and I charge you, as a father may do, to follow my direction
therein; my experience can better tell what is fit for you than your
young years can judge of. I would wish you for the present to make
your chief abode at Cambridge, which is the place fittest for you to
promote your learning in; and beside, it is not very far hence,
whereby you may, within a day's warning, be here to follow your own
causes, as occasion serveth. If, after a year or two, you spend some
time in a house of the law, there is nothing that will prove more to
your commodity, considering how for the time you shall have
continual business about your own law affairs; and thereby also, if
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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