Page:Sir Thomas Browne's works, volume 1 (1835).djvu/139

 Domesttc Correspondence,

THE earliest specimens of Sir Thomas Browne's family correspondence, which have been discovered, are his letters to his younger son Thomas, while in France ; of which the following thirteen, preserved in No. 391 of the Rawlinson Collection of MSS., at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, seem to have been tran- scripts by Mrs. Elizabeth Lyttelton, his daughter. They are in the same hand-writing as those addressed to herself, which are inserted at the close of the Domestic Correspondence. The series is entitled, Letters of my Fathers, which he writ to my Brother Thomas when he went into France, at 14 years of age; 1660. I have not thought proper to alter the spelling of these letters ; but would observe that its faultiness must not be charged on Sir Thomas. He wrote so illegibly (as those are well aware who have been fated to decypher his hieroglyphics) that his or- thography was left at the mercy of the copyist, who, in the present case, seems not to have been remark- ably skilled in that accomplishment.