You are above any incense I can give you, and have all the happiness of an idle life, join’d with the good-nature of an active. Your friends in town are ready to envy the leisure you have given your selfe in the country, though they know you are only their steward, and that you treasure up but so much health as you intend to spend on them in winter. In the mean time, you have withdrawn your selfe from attendance, the curse of courts; you may think on what you please, and that as little as you please; for, in my opinion, thinking it selfe is a kind of pain to a witty man; he finds so much more in it to disquiet than to please him. But I hope your Lordship will not omitt the occasion of laughing at the great Duke of B[uckingham,] who is so uneasy to him selfe by pursuing the honour of lieutenant-general, which flyes him, that he can enjoy nothing he possesses,[60] though, at the same time, he is so unfit to command an army, that he is the only man in the three nations, who does not know it; yet he still picques himself, like his father, to find another Isle of Rhe in Zealand;[61] thinking this disappointment an injury to him, which is indeed a favour, and will not be satisfied but with his own ruin and with ours. ’Tis a strange quality in a man to love idleness so well as to destroy his estate by it; and yet, at the same time, to pursue so violently the most toilsome and most unpleasant part of business. These observations would soon run into lampoon, if I had not forsworn that dangerous part of wit; not so much out of good-nature, but lest from the inborn vanity of poets I should shew it to others, and betray my selfe to a worse mischief than what I do to my enemy. This has been lately the case of Etherege, who, translating a satyr of Boileau’s, and changing the French names for English, read it so often, that it came to their ears who were concern’d, and forced him to leave off the design, e’re it were half finish’d. Two of the verses I remember: I call a spade, a spade; Eaton,[62] a bully; Frampton,[63] a pimp; and brother John, a cully. But one of his friends imagin’d those names not enough for the dignity of a satyr, and chang’d them thus: I call a spade, a spade; Dunbar,[64] a bully; Brounckard,[65] a pimp; and Aubrey Vere,[66] a cully.