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No less than 77 letters survive from the long epistolary courtship of Dorothy Osborne and William Temple (cf. IC15), whose marriage was opposed by both their families, respectively Royalist and Parliamentarian. They eventually married in 1654. The letters reproduced here date from 30 January and 6 February 1653. The extracts concern the fashion for collecting ‘seals’ (the dictionary definition of which is ‘a trinket, containing an engraved stone for sealing letters’), presumably the very seals with which Dorothy sealed her letters to William. In the second extract she comments on one of an ‘idol’ brought from the ‘Indies’, nicely capturing the frisson which must have passed through members of polite society like her, enabled by the burgeoning power of England, to actually touch, and possess, a token of an alien way of life. The extracts are from The Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, with an introduction by Sir E. A. Parry, London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1903, pp. 44–6.

[…] I have sent into Italy for seals; ’tis to be hoped by that time mine come over, they may be out of fashion again, for ’tis an humour that your old acquaintance Mr Smith and his lady has brought up; they say she wears twenty strung upon a ribbon, like the nuts boys play withal, and I do not hear of anything else. Mr Howard presented his mistress but a dozen such seals as are not to be valued as times now go. […]

Sir, – You have made me so rich as I am able to help my neighbours. There is a little head cut in an onyx that I take to be a very good one, and the dolphin is (as you say) the better for being cut less; the oddness of the figure makes the beauty of these things. If you saw one that my brother sent my Lady Diana last week, you would believe it were meant to fright people withal; ’twas brought out of the Indies, and cut there for an idol’s head: they took the devil himself, sure, for their pattern that did it, for in my life I never saw so ugly a thing, and yet she is as fond on’t as if it were as lovely as she herself is.