SEPT. 15, 1734.
I HAVE ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew, of all the delicacies of friendship; and yet I fear (from what lord B. tells me you said in your last letter) that you did not quite understand the reason of my late silence. I assure you it proceeded wholly from the tender kindness I bear you. When the heart is full, it is angry at all words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, since most accounts I have give me pain for you, and I am unwilling to tell you the condition of my own health. If it were good, I would see you; and yet if I found you in that very condition of deafness, which made you fly from us while we were together, what comfort could we derive from it? In writing often I should find great relief, could we write freely; and yet when I have done so, you seem by not answering in a very long time, to feel either the same uneasiness I do, or to abstain from some prudential reason. Yet I am sure, nothing that you and I would say to each other, (though our whole souls were to be laid open to the clerks of the postoffice) could hurt either of us so much, in the
opinion
