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‘I am in a solitude,’ he wrote to Pope, June 1, 1712, ‘an house between Hampstead and London, in which Sir Charles Sedley died, breathing his last,’ he adds, ‘in this very room,’ a circumstance that, in connection with his enforced rusticity, and the circumstances that induced it, combined to waken serious reflections; and writing on this occasion, as Pope himself was said to write, ‘with his reputation in his hand,’ Sir Richard somewhat ungenerously, when we consider the close kinship of many of Sedley’s inclinations with his own, improved the occasion at the dead man’s expense, wholly ignoring the assurance of gossiping Anthony à Wood that poor Sedley, after suffering much for his offences, took up and grew serious, and subsequently became a leading man in the House of Commons. If this be true, it says a good deal for the recuperative moral force concentrated in Sir Charles’s nature. Steele’s cottage stood so nearly opposite to the little hostel, the Load of Hay, that its inhabitants, if so minded, could have almost distinguished the features of the gentlemen of the road who, towards sunset, occasionally drew bridle beside the horse-block in front of the well-worn steps leading into it, to refresh themselves with a tankard of ripe ale, or some more potent stirrup-cup, before starting across country to Brown’s Well, or Finchley Common, places which continued till quite modern times to be words of fear in the vocabulary of travellers.