It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse
with women (as indeed we know little at all about his life)
until he came to Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the
forty-fifth year of his age. At the same time it is just
possible that some of a little group at Edinburgh, with whom
he corresponded during his last absence, may have been
friends of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all
his female correspondents, the least personally favoured. He
treats them throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that
must at times have been a little wounding. Thus, he remits
one of them to his former letters, "which I trust be common
betwixt you and the rest of our sisters, for to me ye are all
equal in Christ." (1) Another letter is a gem in this way.
"Albeit" it begins, "albeit I have no particular matter to
write unto you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to
write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance
of you. True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal
remembrance before God with you, to whom at present I write
nothing, either for that I esteem them stronger than you, and
therefore they need the less my rude labours, or else because
they have not provoked me by their writing to recompense
their remembrance." (2) His "sisters in Edinburgh" had
evidently to "provoke his attention pretty constantly; nearly
all his letters are, on the face of them, answers to
questions, and the answers are given with a certain crudity
that I do not find repeated when he writes to those he really
cares for.
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