First line: ‘Damon that Author of so great renown’.
Prose. First words: ‘Tom I know thou art allow’d to be impudent’. Subscribed ‘Your humble Servant | Bess a Bedlam.’ The writer complains of the immoderate spending of the king’s mistresses and the behaviour of Henry Brouncker and Henry Killigrew, and reference is made to Father St Germain.
First line: ‘Hast thou no Friend so kind, to let thee know’. Subscribed ‘Earl of Dorset.’
Prose.
First line: ‘Mine and the Poets Plague consume you all’.
Prose. Headed: ‘A Coppy of a Letter From the Earl of Shaftsbury to The Earl of Carlisle.’
‘I A.B. do declare that it is not Lawful upon any pretence what soever to take Arms against the King, And that I do abhor that Traiterous Position of taking Arms by his Authority against his Person, or against those that are Commissioners by him, in pursuance of such Commissions, and I do Sweare that I will not at any time Endeavor the Alteration of the Government either in Church or State.’
This is the text of the declaration and oath proposed in the Test Bill introduced on 15 Apr. 1675.
First line: ‘’Tis true that I have lately Seen’.
Prose.
First line: ‘Hear, take this, Warcop, spread this up and down’.
First line: ‘Begin we now a second time’.
Prose. The discourse includes, among other things, a translation of part of a letter by Machiavelli (pp. 113–16) and notes of speeches by Colonel Birch and others in the House of Commons in 1675 and 1676 (pp. 117–21).
First line: ‘Who can but wonder, at this Season’.
Headed: ‘A Country Clown call’d Hodge went up to view the Piramid, pray mark what did ensue.’ First line: ‘When Hodge had Number’d up how many Score’. Subscribed: ‘Decr 1678.’
Motto: ‘Odi Imitatores Servum Pecus etc.’ (adapted from Horace, Epistles, I. xix. 19). First line: ‘Since the united Cunning of the Stage’.
Heading continues: ‘to the Tune of Pretty Peggy Benson’. First line: ‘Wounds what aild the Parliament’.
(Carbon-copy of a typed original, with a few annotations.)
(Inscribed ‘Compliments of the author’.)