I have asked this favour of you, my good friend and neighbour, because I perceive myself going out of the world, and, having great esteem and respect for you, I would willingly bid you farewell before I am gone. I have thought very little about death till it has come upon me as it were at once; all I know of the matter is that we must all die, and so, you see, I must take my turn, as others have done before, and every one must do after me. If it had been my good fortune to have made myself acceptable to your amiable daughter, I might have lived to enjoy, as you do now, a healthy old age; but when a man has neither wife nor family nor friend at hand to jog his memory upon occasion, he will be apt to forget himself at times, and by going too fast come the sooner to his journey’s end. That has been my case, friend De Lancaster, and how could it be otherwise. I have none of those resources that you have; if my house was full of books, they would be of no use to me; I should not read one of them; I never had a turn that way. Time was I took delight in hunting my own hounds; that, you know, is a rational and gentlemanlike amusement, but when I could no longer follow it up, you must think, I was fain to fall upon other means for making away with my time: every man must do that; and what is so natural as to fly to the pleasure of the table, when we can no longer enjoy the sports of the field? So long as I could do both, and take them in their turns, all things went well with me. If a country gentleman like me takes a cup too much over night, he rides it off the next morning, and there’s an end of it; but when he is reduced to the helpless situation, in which you now see me, what is to be done? Life becomes a burden, and the sooner we are quit of it, the better. In truth, my good friend, said De Lancaster, I cannot wonder, if a life, that furnishes no intellectual enjoyments, becomes burdensome: and since it must be resigned when the disposer of our fate sees fit, it is happy for us, when called upon to quit this world, if we find upon reflection that the pleasures of it are not worthy of our regret. I have had no pleasure in it, replied the dying man, since these people came out of Spain to molest me. Had your daughter heard reason, when I first proposed to her, I might have had a son and heir of my own, British born, and, had that been the case, this mongrel of my brother’s fathering, half Jew and half Spaniard, might have been a pedlar, and hawked buckles and buttons about the country to his dying day, for what I had cared: But that is over, and, except the few personals I have willed away to huntsman and other of my friends, together with a keep-sake to your daughter, and my favourite horse Glendowr to my godson, all the real property I am possessed of must go to David by entail, and a despicable David he will be, take my word for it.--