Yet if I dare judge
by my own feelings, who am never weary of your letters--nay, can never
hear enough of your thoughts and doings--I think you will bear with my
expatiations, and not deem them too impertinent.
"Mr. Evelyn's coach was waiting at the landing-stage; and that good
gentleman received us at his hall door. He is not young, and has gone
through much affliction in the loss of his dear children--one, who died
of a fever during that wicked reign of the Usurper Cromwell, was a boy
of gifts and capacities that seemed almost miraculous, and had more
scholarship at five years old than my poor woman's mind could compass were
I to live till fifty. Mr. Evelyn took a kind of sad delight in talking to
Henriette and me of this gifted child, asking her what she knew of this
and that subject, and comparing her extensive ignorance at eleven with his
lamented son's vast knowledge at five. I was more sorry for him than I
dared to say; for I could but think this dear overtaught child might have
died from a perpetual fever of the brain as likely as from a four days'
fever of the body; and afterwards when Mr. Evelyn talked to us of a manner
of forcing fruits to grow in strange shapes--a process in which he was
greatly interested--I thought that this dear infant's mind had been
constrained and directed, like the fruits, into a form unnatural to
childhood.
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