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your noble favours; and I hope you will believe a dying man, that I have as much love as honour for you;-that I bend my feeble knees to the God of heaven, that you, my dear lady, her children, and their children, may be blessed with happiness, external, internal, and eternal; and that the same blessings may fall upon Lady Sunderland and her family.

Dear sir, let your dying chaplain recommend this truth to you and yours,-that no happiness or solid comfort can be secured in this vale of tears, but from living a pious life. I pray you, dear sir, to retain this rule-Never to do that thing upon which you dare not first ask the blessing of God upon the success thereof.

Sir, I have made bold with your name in my will for an executor; and I hope you will not take it ill. Others are joined with you, that will take from you all the trouble. Your favourable aspect will, I know, be a great comfort to my distressed orphans. I am not desirous that they should be great, but good; and it is my earnest request, that they may be brought up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Sir, I thank God that I am willing to shake hands in peace with all the world; and I have comfortable assurances that he will accept me, for the sake of his Son; and I find God more good than ever I imagined, and wish that his goodness were not so much abused and contemned.

I desire you would be pleased to make choice of an humble, pious man to succeed me in this parsonage. Could I see your face before I depart hence, I would inform you which way I

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fied, Bonum magis carendo quam fruendo cernitur. Had I been thankful as my condition did deserve of me, I might yet have had my dearest in my bosom. But now, farewell all happy days! and God grant that I may repent of my great ingratitude!

My

The condition of this place hath been so dreadful, that I persuade myself it exceeded all history and example. I may truly say, our town was become a Golgotha, the place of skulls; and, had there not been a small remnant of us left, we had been as Sodom, and like unto Gomorrah. ears never heard such doleful lamentations,-my nose never smelt such noisome smells, eyes never beheld such ghastly spectacles. Here have been seventy-six families visited within my parish, out of which died two hundred and fifty

nine persons.

and my

Blessed be God, our fears are now over, none having died of the infection since the eleventh of October, nor is there any one under present suspicion, and all the pesthouses have been several weeks empty.

I intend, if it please God, to spend most of this week in seeing all woollen clothes fumed and purified, as well for the satisfaction as the safety of the country. Here hath been such burying of goods, as the like surely was never known; and, indeed, I think in this we have been too precise. For my own part, I have hardly left apparel to shelter my body from the cold, and have wasted more than need, for example's sake merely.

As to myself, I never was in better health than during the whole time of this dreadful visita

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