last.[1] The Mashams became Lords Masham in the next generations, and so continued for a while; one Lady Masham was a daughter of Philosopher Cudworth, and is still remembered as the friend of John Locke, whom she tended in his old days; who lies buried, as his monument still shows, at the Church of High Laver, in the neighbourhood of which Otes Mansion stood. High Laver, Essex, not far from Harlow Station on the Northeastern Railway. The Mashams are all extinct, and their Mansion is swept away as if it had not been. ‘Some forty years ago,’ says my kind informant, ‘a wealthy Maltster of Bishop’s Stortford became the proprietor by purchase; and pulled the Manorhouse down; leaving the outhouses as cottages to some poor people.’ The name Otes, the tomb of Locke, and this undestroyed and now indestructible fraction of Rag-paper alone preserve the memory of Mashamdom in this world. We modernise the spelling; let the reader, for it may be worth his while, endeavour to modernise the sentiment and subject-matter.
There is only this farther to be premised, That St. John, the celebrated Shipmoney Barrister, has married for his second wife a Cousin of Oliver Cromwell’s, a Daughter of Uncle Henry’s, whom we knew at Upwood long ago;[2] which Cousin, and perhaps her learned husband reposing from his arduous law-duties along with her, is now on a Summer or Autumn visit at Otes, and has lately seen Oliver there.
TO MY BELOVED COUSIN MRS. ST JOHN, AT SIR WILLIAM MASHAM HIS HOUSE CALLED OTES, IN ESSEX* PRESENT THESE.
Dear Cousin,—I thankfully acknowledge your love in your kind remembrance of me upon this opportunity. Alas, you do too highly prize my lines, and my company. I may be
