Your letter was one of the greatest surprises to me, I ever met with; for after giving credit to that fulsome piece of flattery, stuck up by some of your friends upon a pillar behind the organ, which you once were master of, I remain’d satisfi’d you were gone to that happy place, where your own harmony could only be exceeded, and had left order with some of your friends to put up that epitaph only as a direction where your acquaintance upon occasion might be sure to meet with you; but since you have favour’d me with a letter from your own hand, wherein you assure me ’twas your fortune to travel a quite contrary road, I will always be of opinion for the future, that when a man takes a step in the dark, those that he leaves behind him can no more guess where he is gone, than I can tell what’s become of the saddle which _Balaam_ rid upon when his ass spoke; for I find just as people please or displease us in this world, we accordingly assign them a place of happiness or unhappiness in the next, virtue shall be rewarded, and vice punished hereafter, ’tis true, but when or how, I believe every man knows as well as the pope; therefore, many people have blam’d the inscription of your marble, and think it a presumption in the pen-man to be so very positive in matters, which the wisest of mankind, without death, can come to no true knowledge of. The fanaticks especially are very highly offended at it, and say, It looks as if a man could toot himself to heaven upon the whore of _Babylon_’s bag-pipes, and that religion consists only in the true setting of a catch, or composing of a madrigal. I have had many a bitter squabble with them in defence of your epitaph, upon which they scoffingly advis’d me to get Monsieur _d’Urfey_ to tag it with rhime, then myself to garnish it with a tune, and so make it a catch in imitation of _Under this stone lies Gabriel John_, &c. which unlucky saying, so dum-founded me, that I was forc’d silently to submit, because you had serv’d another person’s epitaph after the same manner.