"I am very glad (for my own sake) that you have the happiness to be known to my Lord Newcastle. I commit the managing what concerns me, both in substance and circumstance, wholly to your direction and dexterity: I told you how far I was advanced by my Lord Withrington. I pray remember my service to Mr. Hobbs by the same token that Sydney Godolphin hath left to him by his Will, a legacy of L200, and desire him for old aquaintance sake, and for your intercession, to bestow one of his books upon me, which I have never seen since it was printed, and therefore know not how much it is the same, which I had the favour to read in English. I thank you for your wishing your self here. I am sure I would purchase you at any price I could pay or promise, if it were as fit for the prince, as it would be for me. In the mean time I pray God he thinks your company as good as they know it to be who cannot get it. But will the good Bishop of Salisbury never come to relieve you? What does he? Where is he? What do you answer to the other thousand questions I have asked you? "God send you a good New Year that may yield you a decent plenty, till it may give you an honest peace, and me meat enough against hunger, and cloathes enough against cold. "And then if the Stationers do not sue out a commission of Bankruptcy against me for their arrears for paper and ink, I shall not fear any other creditors, nor the exception in the first where I will not give my place for the best amongst the compounders, nor the worst (that is the greatest) amongst the committee: less the title of being. Sir, yours, etc." "Jersey, the 1st of January." A Copy of Mr. Edgeman, 1646-1649. SIR EDWARD HYDE TO DR. JOHN EARLES. "Well, admit you do spend three hours every day, that you may spend one with the prince, allow two hours to your dinner, and two hours in the projecting where to get one, you have still a fair time to yourself, and one half hour in a week, without question, to tell me that you are alive, and that in this dismal time of mutation, you are so far from change, that you continue even the same to me. "I am not willing to tell you, that though you owe me no letters, you have three or four of mine unanswered, but I must tell you the last packet from Paris brought me none from you though I found by some I received, that mine thither had not miscarried; so you were not without provocation.