Your Provost[14] is a coxcomb.  Stella is a good girl for not being angry when I tell her of spelling; I see none wrong in this.  God Almighty be praised that your disorder lessens; it increases my hopes mightily that they will go off.  And have you been plagued with the fear of the plague? never mind those reports; I have heard them five hundred times.  Replevi?  Replevin, simpleton, ’tis Dingley I mean; but it is a hard word, and so I’ll excuse it.  I stated Dingley’s accounts in my last.  I forgot Catherine’s sevenpenny dinner.  I hope it was the beef-steaks; I’ll call and eat them in spring; but Goody Stoyte must give me coffee, or green tea, for I drink no bohea.  Well, ay, the pamphlet; but there are some additions to the fourth edition; the fifth edition was of four thousand, in a smaller print, sold for sixpence.  Yes, I had the twenty-pound bill from Parvisol:  and what then?  Pray now eat the Laracor apples; I beg you not to keep them, but tell me what they are.  You have had Tooke’s bill in my last.  And so there now, your whole letter is answered.  I tell you what I do; I lay your letter before me, and take it in order, and answer what is necessary; and so and so.  Well, when I expected we were all undone, I designed to retire for six months, and then steal over to Laracor; and I had in my mouth a thousand times two lines of Shakespeare, where Cardinal Wolsey says,

     “A weak old man, battered with storms of state,
      Is come to lay his weary bones among you."[15]

I beg your pardon; I have cheated you all this margin, I did not perceive it; and I went on wider and wider like Stella; awkward sluts; she writes so so, there:[16] that’s as like as two eggs a penny.—­“A weak old man,” now I am saying it, and shall till to-morrow.—­The Duke of Marlborough says there is nothing he now desires so much as to contrive some way how to soften Dr. Swift.  He is mistaken; for those things that have been hardest against him were not written by me.  Mr. Secretary told me this from a friend of the Duke’s; and I’m sure now he is down, I shall not trample on him; although I love him not, I dislike his being out.—­Bernage was to see me this morning, and gave some very indifferent excuses for not calling here so long.  I care not twopence.  Prince Eugene did not dine with the Duke of Marlborough on Sunday, but was last night at Lady Betty Germaine’s assemblee, and a vast number of ladies to see him.  Mr. Lewis and I dined with a private friend.  I was this morning to see the Duke of Ormond, who appointed me to meet him at the Cockpit at one, but never came.  I sat too some time with the Duchess.  We don’t like things very well yet.  I am come home early, and going to be busy.  I’ll go write.