_An old man's occupations_
Wotton, 22 _July_, 1700.
I could no longer suffer this old servant of mine to pass and repass
so near Clapham without a particular account of your health and all
your happy family. You will now inquire what I do here? Why, as the
patriarchs of old, I pass the days in the fields, among horses and
oxen, sheep, cows, bulls, and sows, _et cetera pecora campi_. We have,
thank God! finished our hay harvest prosperously. I am looking after
my hinds, providing carriage and tackle against reaping time and
sowing. What shall I say more? _Venio ad voluptates agricolarum_,
which Cicero, you know, reckons amongst the most becoming diversions
of old age; and so I render it. This without: now within doors, never
was any matron more busy than my wife, disposing of our plain
country furniture for a naked old extravagant house, suitable to
our employments. She has a dairy, and distaffs, for _lac, linum, et
lanam_, and is become a very Sabine. But can you thus hold out? Will
my friend say; is philosophy, Gresham College, and the example of Mr.
Pepys, and agreeable conversation of York Buildings, quite forgotten
and abandoned? No, no! _Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret_.
Know I have been ranging of no fewer than thirty large cases of books,
destined for a competent standing library, during four or five days
wholly destitute of my young coadjutor, who, upon some pretence of
being much engaged in the mathematics, and desiring he may continue
his course at Oxford till the beginning of August, I have wholly left
it to him. You will now suspect something by this disordered hand;
truly I was too happy in these little domestic affairs, when, on the
sudden, as I was about my books in the library, I found myself sorely
attacked with a shivering, followed by a feverish indisposition, and
a strangury, so as to have kept, not my chamber only, but my bed, till
very lately, and with just so much strength as to scribble these lines
to you. For the rest, I give God thanks for this gracious warning, my
great age calling upon me _sarcinam componere_ every day expecting it,
who have still enjoyed a wonderful course of bodily health for forty
years....