It appears to have been a not unusual practice among lovers of this period to prescribe for their sweethearts, as we find Dorothy Osborne writing about some infusion of steel in which she drinks Sir William Temple’s health every morning. She vows that it makes her horribly ill, says that it is a “drench that would poison a horse,” and declines to continue its use unless her lover insists upon her doing so. In another of her charming letters she gives Sir William many directions about the care of his precious health, and even does a little quacking on his behalf, sending him a new medicine for his cold, of which she says,-- “’Tis like the rest of my medicines: if it do no good ’twill do no harm and ’twill be no great trouble to take a little on’t now and then; for the taste on’t as it is not excellent, so ’tis not very ill.” It is well that some of these old letters of sentiment and domestic life are left us, for did we not occasionally catch glimpses of the great men of the past penning tender messages to beloved objects (sometimes, indeed, spelling them very ill), writing about their children and sending them trinkets and gewgaws, they would become to us shadowy personages, very spectres, and hauntings of a dream. To those who are only acquainted with James Logan, William Penn’s young secretary, through his official correspondence and endless business letters, he must appear a very didactic and uninteresting personage; yet reading between the lines, or scanning a stray letter addressed to some friend or relative, we catch a sight of the real man, of like passions with ourselves. Mrs. Hannah Penn, who survived her lover’s generous hampers and curious medical prescriptions and became a happy wife and the mother of a brood of sturdy young Penns, was well qualified to be a lover’s _confidante_, and to her James Logan was pleased to unburden his numerous and, it must be admitted, unsuccessful love-affairs. A disappointed lover may not be the most attractive object in every-day life, but for some indefinable reason it adds to the historic interest of a man, especially to the feminine reader, to know that he loved and wooed in vain and bewailed his fate in prose or verse. Otherwise, why should generations of school-girls weep over the sorrows of Werther? The young secretary was enamoured of Letitia Penn, her of the pig’s brawn, and Rebecca Moore, and several others, if we are to judge from his letters. Letitia married William Aubrey, for whom James Logan’s admiration was ever after of the scantest. His allusion to his rival’s rapacity in money-matters, saying that he was “a tiger for returns,” by which he referred to quit-rents and the like, may not have been high-minded, but was it not natural? and also that he should have found few words in which to praise Governor Evans, whom the fair Rebecca Moore made supremely happy? It was not, however, written in the book of fate that this excellent Quaker youth should forever woo