Sure it does; at least mine rises some degrees, or seems to rise: try if it will fall by coming nearer: no, certainly it cannot be higher. Yours most affectionately,
WHILE any of those who used to write to me were alive, I always inquired after you. But since your secretaryship in the queen's time, I believed you were so glutted with the office, that you had not patience to venture on a letter to an absent useless acquaintance: and I find I owe yours to my lord Oxford. The history you mention was written above a year before the queen's death. I left it with the treasurer and lord Bolingbroke, when I first came over to take this deanery. I returned in less than a month; but the ministry could not agree about printing it. It was to conclude with the peace. I staid in London above nine months; but not being able to reconcile the quarrels between those two, I went to a friend in Berkshire, and on the queen's death, came hither for good and all. I am confident you read that history; as this lord Oxford did, as he owns in his two letters, the last of which reached me not above ten days ago. You know, on the queen's death, how the peace and all proceedings
were
