LETTERS FROM BIRCH. 283 



To the King.* 



* * * Lastly, I will make two prayers unto your ma 

 jesty, as I used to do to God Almighty, when I commend 

 to him his own glory and cause ; so I will pray to your 

 majesty for yourself. 



The one is, that these cogitations of want do not any 

 ways trouble or vex your mind. I remember Moses saith 

 of the land of promise, that it was not like the land of 

 Egypt that was watered with a river, but was watered with 

 showers from heaven; whereby I gather, God preferreth 

 sometimes uncertainties before certainties, because they 

 teach a more immediate dependance upon his providence. 

 Sure I am, nil novi accidit vobis. It is no new thing for 

 the greatest kings to be in debt : and, if a man shall parvis 

 componere magna, I have seen an Earl of Leicester, a Chan 

 cellor Hatton, an Earl of Essex, and an Earl of Salisbury, 

 in debt ; and yet was it no manner of diminution to their 

 power or greatness. 



My second prayer is, that your majesty, in respect of the 

 hasty freeing of your estate, would not descend to any 

 means, or degree of means, which carrieth not a symmetry 

 with your majesty and greatness. He is gone from whom 

 those courses did wholly flow. So have your wants and 

 necessities in particular, as it were, hanged up in two 

 tablets before the eyes of your Lords and Commons, to be 

 talked of for four months together ; to have all your courses 

 to help yourself in revenue or profit put into printed books, 

 which were wont to be held arcana imperil ; to have such 

 worms of aldermen to lend for ten in the hundred upon 

 good assurance, and with such * *, as if it should save the 

 bark of your fortune ; to contract still where might be had 

 the readiest payment, and not the best bargain ; to stir a 

 number of projects for your profit, and then to blast them, 

 and leave your majesty nothing but the scandal of them; 

 to pretend an even carriage between your majesty s rights 

 and the ease of the people, and to satisfy neither. These 

 courses, and others the like, I hope, are gone with the de 

 viser of them, which have turned your majesty to inestima 

 ble prejudice.f 



* The beginning of this letter is wanting. 



t It will be but justice to the memory of the Earl of Salisbury to remark, that 

 this disadvantageous character of him by Sir Francis Bacon seems to have been 

 heightened by the prejudices of the latter against that able minister, grounded 

 upon some suspicions, that the earl had not served him with so much zeal as he 

 might have expected from so near a relation, either in Queen Elizabeth s reign 

 or that of her successor. Nor is it any just imputation on his lordship, that he 

 began to decline in King James the First s good opinion, when his majesty * ill 



