where
we shall go to loggerheads, my thoughts are running upon a fair enemy in
England. I was in hopes I had left you there; but you follow the camp,
though I have endeavoured to make some of our leaguer ladies drive you
out of the field. All my comfort is, you are more troublesome to my
colonel than myself: I permit you to visit me only now and then; but he
downright keeps you. I laugh at his Honour as far as his gravity will
allow me; but I know him to be a man of too much merit to succeed with a
woman. Therefore defend your heart as well as you can, I shall come home
this winter irresistibly dressed, and with quite a new foreign air. And
so I had like to say, I rest, but alas! I remain,

"Madam,

"Your most obedient,

"Most humble Servant,

"JOHN CARELESS."

Now for Colonel Constant's epistle; you see it is folded and directed
with the utmost care.

"MADAM,

"I do myself the honour to write to you this evening, because I believe
to-morrow will be a day of battle, and something forebodes in my breast
that I shall fall in it. If it proves so, I hope you will hear, I have
done nothing below a man who had a love of his country, quickened by a
passion for a woman of honour. If there be anything noble in going to a
certain death; if there be any merit, that I meet it with pleasure, by
promising myself a place in your esteem; if your applause, when I am no
more, is preferable to the most glorious life without you: I say, madam,
if any of these considerations can have weight with you, you will give
me a kind place in your memory, which I prefer to the glory of Caesar. I
hope, this will be read, as it is writ, with tears."

The beloved lady is a woman of a sensible mind; but she has confessed
to me, that after all her true and solid value for Constant, she had
much more concern for the loss of Careless. Those great and serious
spirits have something equal to the adversities they meet with, and
consequently lessen the objects of pity. Great accidents seem not cut
out so much for men of familiar characters, which makes them more easily
pitied, and soon after beloved. Add to this, that the sort of love which
generally succeeds, is a stranger to awe and distance. I asked Romana,
whether of the two she should have chosen had they survived? She said,
she knew she ought to have taken Constant; but believed she should have
chosen Careless.

St. James's Coffee-house, June 17.

L