lift a cat upon my shoulders; but if you are for a curacy of twenty-five pounds a-year, and ride five miles every Sunday to preach to six beggars, have at you and yet this is no ill country, and the bishop has made, in four months, twelve miles of ditches from his house to the Shannon, if you talk of improving. How are you this moment? Do you love or hate Quilca the most of all places? Are you in or out of humour with the world, your friends, your wife, and your school? Are the ladies in town or in the country? If I knew, I would write to them; and how are they in health? Quilca (let me see) (you see I can (if I please) make parentheses as well as others) is about a hundred miles from Clonfert; and I am half weary with the four hundred I have rid. With love, and service, and so, adieu. Yours, &c. TO MR POPE. Dublin, Sept. 20, 1723. RETURNING from a summer expedition of four months on account of my health, I found a letter from you, with an appendix longer than yours from Lord Bolingbroke. I believe there is not a more miserable malady than an unwillingness to write letters to our best friends, and a man might be philosopher enough in finding out reasons for it. One thing is clear, that it shews a mighty difference betwixt friendship and love, for a lover (as I have heard) is always scribbling to his mistress. If I could permit myself to believe what your civility makes you say, that I am still remembered by my friends in England, I am in the right to keep myself here Non sum qualis eram. I left you in a period of life when one year does more execution than three at yours, to which if you add the dulness of air, and of the people, it will make a terrible sum. I have no very strong faith in your pretenders to retirement; * you are not of an age for it, nor have gone through either good or bad fortune enough to go into a corner, and form conclusions de contemptu mundi et fuga sæculi, unless a poet grows weary of too much applause, as ministers do of too much weight of business. Your happiness is greater than your merit, in choosing your favourites so indifferently among either party this you owe partly to your education, and partly to your genius employing you in an art in which faction has nothing to do, for I suppose Virgil and Horace are equally read by whigs and tories. You have no more to do with the constitution of church and state than a Christian at Constantinople; and you are so much the wiser and the happier, because both parties will approve your poetry, as long as you are known to be of neither. Your notions of friendship are new to me; † I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first places *Swift was too sensible an observer of nature to be deceived by the language of Bolingbroke or Pope, however they might perhaps deceive themselves.-BOWLES. + Yet they are the Christian notions.-WARBURTON. in my friendship, but they are not in the way: I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least; and should do the same to my fellow prisoners, if I were condemned to jail. I can likewise tolerate knaves much better than fools, because their knavery does me no hurt in the commerce I have met with them, which however I own is more dangerous, though not so troublesome, as that of fools. I have often endeavoured to establish a friendship among all men of genius, and would fain have it done; they are seldom above three or four contemporaries, and if they would be united would drive the world before them. I think it was so among the poets in the time of Augustus; but envy, and party, and pride, have hindered it among us. I do not include the subalterns, of which you are seldom without a large tribe. Under the name of poets and scribblers, I suppose you mean the fools you are content to see sometimes, when they happen to be modest; which was not frequent among them while I was in the world. I would describe to you my way of living, if any method could be called so in this country. I choose my companions among those of least consequence and most compliance: I read the most trifling books I can find, and whenever I write, it is upon the most trifling subjects; but riding, walking, and sleeping take up eighteen of the twenty-four hours. I procrastinate more than I did twenty years ago, and have several things to finish which I put off to twenty years hence; Hæc est vita solutorum, &c. I send you the compliments of a friend of yours, who has passed four months this summer with two grave acquaintance at his country house, without 2 ever once going to Dublin, which is but eight miles distant; yet when he returns to London, I will engage you shall find him as deep in the court of requests, the park, the operas, and the coffeehouse, as any man there. I am now with him for a few days. You must remember me with great affection to Dr Arbuthnot, Mr Congreve, and Gay.I think there are no more eodem tertios between you and me, except Mr Jervas, to whose house I address this, for want of knowing where you live: for it was not clear from your last whether you lodge with Lord Peterborow, or he with you! I am ever, &c. I HAVE as good a right to invade your solitude as Lord Bathurst, Gay, or Pope, and you see I make use of it. I know you wish us all at the devil for robbing a moment from your vapours and vertigo. It is no matter for that; you shall have a sheet of paper every post till you come to yourself. By a paragraph in yours to Mr Pope, I find you are in the case of the man, who held the whole night by a broom bush, and found when daylight appeared, he was within two inches of the ground. You do *Endorsed, "Received Nov. 17, 1723,".--N. VOL. XVI, not seem to know how well you stand with our great folks. I myself have been at a great man's table, and have heard, out of the mouths of violent Irish whigs, the whole table turn all upon your commendation. If it had not been upon the general topic of your good qualities, and the good you did, I should have grown jealous of you. My intention in this is not to expostulate, but to do you good. I know how unhappy a vertigo makes any body that has the misfortune to be troubled with it. I might have been deep in it myself, if I had had a mind, and I will propose a cure for you, that I will pawn my reputation upon. I have of late sent several patients in that case to the Spa, to drink there of the Geronstere water, which will not carry from the spot. It has succeeded marvellously with them all. There was indeed one, who relapsed a little this last summer, because he would not take my advice, and return to his course, that had been too short the year before. But, because the instances of eminent men are most conspicuous, Lord Whitworth, our plenipotentiary, had this disease, (which, by the way, is a litile disqualifying for that employment ;) he was so bad that he was often forced to catch hold of any thing to keep him from falling. I know he was recovered by the use of that water to so great a degree, that he can ride, walk, or do any thing as formerly. I leave this to your consideration. Your friends here wish to see you, and none more than myself; but I really do not advise you to such a journey to gratify thein or myself; but I am almost confident, it would do you a great deal of good. The dragon is just the old man, when he is roused. He is a little deaf, but has all his other good and bad qualities just as of old. Lord B is much improved in know |