Note 20 — Chapter II · THE FOUNDER OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY. (continued 2)

Take, for example, these few lines: ‘Sweete Sainte whome I soley addore,—at whooes srine I offer myself; I reseived your loving lines.... Without them, I could not live at all;—being deprived of your blessed sight, ... I live yet, but most miserably. Use means, if it be possible, that we may come to the speech of one another; and the Heavens of Hope may be yet auspitious unto us.... Those deviles have again been writing letters unto my mother.’ In 1679, it would seem, the two ardent lovers were kept in a sort of honourable imprisonment. On Cotton’s coming to Cotton House, in the spring of that year, an upper servant of the family writes thus to a correspondent: ‘I advised him to call for money; take a coach and go about to take the air, and to visit his friends that are in or about the town; and not to be mewed up in a room, without money or company.’—John Squires, to a person unnamed; in Appendix to Cotton MSS. ‘16, 1.’ (B. M.)