LETTERS TO AND FROM DR. JONATHAN SWIFT, &c. FROM THE YEAR 1714 TO 1737. LETTER I. MR. POPE TO DR. SWIFT. June 18, 1714. WHATEVER Apologies it might become me to make at any other time for writing to you, I shall use none now, to a man who has owned himself as splenetic as a Cat in the Country. In that circumstance, I know by experience a letter is a very useful, as well as amusing thing: if you are too busied in state affairs to read it, yet you may find entertainment in folding it into divers figures, either doubling it into a pyramidical, or twisting it into a serpentine form: or, if your disposition should not be so mathematical, in taking it with you to that place where men of studious minds are apt to sit longer than ordinary; where, after an abrupt division of the paper, it may not be unpleasant to try to fit and rejoin the broken lines together. All these amusements I am no stranger to in the Country, and doubt not but (by this time) you begin to relish them, in your present contemplative situation. I remember a man who was thought to have some knowledge in the world, used to affirm, that no people in town ever complained they were forgotten by their Friends in the country: but my increasing experience convinces me he was mistaken, for I find a great many here grievously complaining of you, upon this score. I am told further, that you treat the few you correspond with in a very arrogant style, and tell them you admire at their insolence in disturbing your meditations, or even inquiring of your retreat1: but this I will not positively assert, because I never received any such insulting Epistle from you. My Lord Oxford says you have not written to him once since you went but this perhaps may be only policy, and I, who am half a Whig, must not entirely credit any thing he affirms. At Button's it is reported you are gone to Hanover, and that Gay goes only on an Embassy to you. Others apprehend some dangerous State treatise from and a Wit, who affects to imitate Balsac, says that the Ministry now are like those Heathens of old who received their oracles from the Woods. The Gentlemen of the Roman Catholic persuasion are not unwilling to credit me, when I whisper, that you are gone to meet some Jesuits commissioned from the Court of Rome, in order to settle the most conve in him or you your retirement; Some time before the death of Queen Anne, when her Ministers were quarrelling, and the Dean could not reconcile them, he retired to a Friend's house at Letcomb in Berkshire, and never saw them after. |