Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/331

Rh tinual communication with Robert Hammond. Certain of their Letters to him had, after various fortune, come into the hands of the Honourable Mr. Yorke (Lord Hardwicke); and were lying in his house, when it and they were, in 1752, accidentally burnt. A Dr. Joseph Litherland had, by good luck, taken copies; Thomas Birch, lest fire should again intervene, printed the Collection,—a very thin Octavo, London, 1764. He has given some introductory account of Robert Hammond; copying, as we do mainly here, from Wood’s Athene; and has committed—as who does not—several errors. His Annotations are sedulous but ineffectual. What of the Letters are from Oliver we extract with thanks.

‘Our brethren’ in the following Letter are the Scots, now all excluded from Derby-House Committee of Both Kingdoms. The ‘Recorder’ is Glyn, one of the vanished Eleven, Stapleton being another; for both of whom it has been necessary to appoint substitutes in the said Committee.

''Dear Robin,—Now, blessed be God, I can write and thou receive freely. I never in my life saw more deep sense, and less will to show it unchristianly, than in that which thou didst write to us when we were at Windsor, and thou in the midst of thy temptation,—which indeed, by what we understand of it, was a great one, and occasioned the greater by the Letter the General sent thee; of which thou wast not mistaken when thou didst challenge me to be the penner.''

''How good has God been to dispose all to mercy! And although it was trouble for the present, yet glory has come out of it; for which we praise the Lord with thee and for thee. And truly thy carriage has been such as occasions much honour''