LETTER XXXII.

TO MRS STEWARD.

MADAM, Thursday, Feb. 9th.--98[-9.]

For this time I must follow a bad example, and send you a shorter letter than your short one: you were hinder’d by dancers, and I am forc’d to dance attendance all this afternoon after a troublesome business, so soon as I have written this, and seal’d it. Onely I can assure you, that your father and mother, and all your relations, are in health, or were yesterday, when I sent to enquire of their welfare. On Tuesday night we had a violent wind, which blew down three of my chimneys, and dismantled all one side of my house, by throwing down the tiles. My neighbours, and indeed all the town, suffer’d more or less; and some were kill’d. The great trees in St James’s Park are many of them torn up from the roots; as they were before Oliver Cromwell’s death,[149] and the late queen’s: but your father had no damage. I sent my man for the present you designed me; but he return’d empty-handed; for there was no such man as _Carter_ a carrier, inning at the Bear and Ragged Staff in Smithfield, nor any one there ever heard of such a person; by which I guess that some body has deceived you with a counterfeited name. Yet my, obligations are the same; and the favour shall be always own’d by,

Madam, Your most humble servant, and kinsman, JOHN DRYDEN.

_For Mrs Stewart_, _Att Cotterstock neare Oundle_, &c.