A LETTER TO A FRIEND, UPON OCCASION OF THE DEATH OF HIS INTIMATE FRIEND. FIFTH EDITION. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 1690. EDITOR'S PREFACE. THE LETTER TO A FRIEND was printed, after the author's death, by his son, as a folio pamphlet, in 1690. The only copy I ever saw is in the library of the British Museum. It was reprinted, in the Posthumous Works, in 1712; and the latter portion of it (from page 48, Posthumous Works) was included in the Christian Morals, and for that reason is not here reprinted. From a collation with a MS. copy in the British Museum, (MS. Sloan. 1862), several additional passages are given. LETTER TO A FRIEND. GIVE me leave to wonder that news of this nature should have such heavy wings that you should hear so little concerning your dearest friend, and that I must make that unwilling repetition to tell you, ad portam rigidos calces extendit, that he is dead and buried, and by this time no puny among the mighty nations of the dead; for though he left this world not very many days past, yet every hour you know largely addeth unto that dark society; and considering the incessant mortality of mankind, you cannot conceive there dieth in the whole earth so few as a thousand an hour. Although at this distance you had no early account or particular of his death, yet your affection may cease to wonder that you had not some secret sense or intimation thereof by dreams, thoughtful whisperings, mercurisms, airy nuncios or sympathetical insinuations, which many seem to have had at the death of their dearest friends: for since we find in that famous story, that spirits themselves were fain to tell their fellows at a distance that the great Antonio was dead, we have a sufficient excuse for our ignorance in such particulars, and must rest content with the common road, and Appian way of knowledge by information. Though the uncertainty of the end of this world hath confounded all human predictions; yet they who shall live to see the sun and moon darkened and the stars to fall from heaven, will hardly be deceived in the advent of the last day; and therefore strange it is, that the common fallacy of consumptive persons who feel not themselves |