at you, for complaining to Mr. * of my not having a pension, and am so again at your naming it to a certain Lord. I have given proof in the course of my whole Life (from the time when I was in the friendship of Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Craggs, even to this when I am civilly treated by Sir R. Walpole), that I never thought myself so warm in any party's cause as to deserve their money; and therefore would never have accepted it but give me leave to tell you, that of all mankind the two persons I would least have accepted any favour from, are those very two, to whom you have unluckily spoken of it. I desire you to take off any impressions which that dialogue may have left on his Lordship's mind, as if I ever had any thought of being beholden to him, or any other, in that way. And yet, you know, I am no enemy to the present Constitution; I believe, as sincere a well-wisher to it, nay, even to the church established, as any Minister in or out of employment whatever; or any Bishop of England or Ireland. Yet am I of the Religion of Erasmus, a Catholic; so I live, so I shall die; and hope one day to meet you, Bishop Atterbury, the younger Craggs, Dr. Garth; Dean Berkley, and Mr. Hutchenson, in that place. To which God of his infinite mercy bring us, 'ánd every body!

Lord B.'s answer to your letter I have just received, and join it to this pacquet. The work he speaks of with such abundant partiality, is a system of Ethics in the Horatian way.

LETTER XLV.

April 14, 1730.

THIS is a letter extraordinary, to do and say nothing but recommend to you (as a Clergyman, and a charitable one) a pious and a good work, and for a good and an honest man: moreover he is above seventy, and poor, which you might think included in the word honest. I shall think it a kindness done myself, if you can propagate Mr. Westley's subscription for his Commentary on Job, among your Divines (Bishops excepted, of whom there is no hope), and among such as are believers, or readers, of Scripture even the curious may find something to please them, if they scorn to be edified. It has been the labour of eight years of this learned man's life; I call him what he is, a learned man, and I engage you

will

prose more than

you formerly could

approve his his poetry. Lord Bolingbroke is a favourer of it, and allows you to do your best to serve an old Tory, and a sufferer for the Church of England, though you are a Whig, as I am.

We have here some verses in your name, which I am angry at. Sure you would not use me so ill as to flatter me! I therefore think it some other weak Irishman.

P.S. I did not take the pen out of Pope's hands, I protest to you. But since he will not fill the remainder of the page, I think I may without offence.

I seek no epistolary fame, but am a good deal pleased to think that it will be known hereafter that you and I lived in the most friendly intimacy together.-Pliny writ his letters for the public3, so did Seneca, so did Balsac, Voiture, etc. Tully did not, and therefore these give us more pleasure than any which have come down to us from antiquity. When we read them, we pry into a secret which was intended to be kept from us. That is a pleasure. We see Cato, and Brutus, and Pompey, and others, such as they really were, and not such as the gaping multitude of their own age took them to be, or as Historians and Poets have represented them to ours. That is another pleasure. I remember to have seen a procession at Aix la Chapelle, wherein an image of Charlemagne is carried on the shoulders of a man, who is hid by the long robe of the imperial Saint. Follow him into the vestry, you see the bearer slip from under the robe, and the gigantic figure dwindles into an image of the ordinary size, and is set by among other lumber. I agree much with Pope, that our climate is rather better than that you are in, and perhaps your public spirit would be less grieved, or oftener comforted, here than there. Come to us therefore on a visit at' least. It will not be the fault of several persons here, if you do not come to live with us. But great good will, and little power produce such slow and feeble effects as can be acceptable to heaven alone, and heavenly men. I know you will be angry with me,

A just and sensible criticism on Epistolary writings, which we should bear in our minds whilst we are reading this collection of Letters.

if I say nothing to you of a poor woman, who is still on the other side of the water in a most languishing state of health. If she regains strength enough to come over (and she is better within these few weeks), I shall nurse her in this farm with all the care and tenderness possible. If she does not, I must pay her the last duty of friendship wherever she is, though I break through the whole plan of life which I have formed in my mind. Adieu. I am most faithfully. and affectionately yours.

LETTER XLVI.`

LORD B. TO DR. SWIFT.

Jan. 17, 1730-31.

I BEGIN my letter by telling you that my wife has been returned from abroad about a month, and that her health, though feeble and precarious, is better than it has been these two years. She is much your servant, and as she has been her own physician with some success, imagines she could be yours with the same.

Would to God you was within her reach! She would, I believe, prescribe a great deal of the medicina animi, without having recourse to the Books of Trismegistus. Pope and I should be her principal apothecaries in the course of the cure; and though our best Botanists complain, that few of the herbs and simples which go to the composition of these remedies, are to be found at present in our soil, yet

there are more of them here than in Ireland; besides, by the help of a little chemistry the most noxious juices may become salubrious, and rank poison a specific.-Pope is now in my library with me, and writes to the world, to the present and to future ages, whilst I begin this letter which he is to finish to you. What good he will do to mankind I know not; this comfort he may be sure of, he cannot do less than you have done before him.. I have sometimes thought, that if preachers, hangmen, and moral-writers keep vice at a stand, or so much as retard the progress of it, they do as much as human nature admits; a real reformation is not to be brought about by ordinary means; it requires those extraordinary means which become punishments as well as lessons: National corruption must be purged by national calamities.Let us hear from you. We deserve this attention, because we desire it, and because we believe that you desire to hear from us.

4

Bolingbroke has enlarged on this topic in his Philosophical works, intending to depreciate Christianity by shewing that it has not had a general effect on the morals of mankind, nor produced a real Reformation:—an argument nothing to the purpose, nor any impeachment of the Doctrines of the Gospel; even if it were well founded, as it certainly is not.

France affords a striking example of this truth.