practising to get health to bear it: the only inconvenience is, that I grow old in the experiment. Although I care not to talk to you as a Divine, yet I hope you have not been author of your colic: do you drink bad wine, or keep bad company? Are you not as many years older as I? It will not always Et tibi quos mihi dempserit apponet annos. I am heartily sorry you have any dealing with that ugly distemper, and I believe our friend Arbuthnot will recommend you to temperance and exercise. I wish they could have as good an effect upon the giddiness I am subject to, and which this moment I am not free from. I should have been glad if you had lengthened your letter by telling me the present condition of many of my old acquaintance, Congreve, Arbuthnot, Lewis, &c., but you mention only Mr. Pope, who I believe is lazy, or else he might have added three lines of his own. I am extremely glad he is not in your case of needing great men's favour, and could heartily wish that you were in his. I have been considering why poets have such ill success in making their court, since they are allowed to be the greatest and best of all flatterers. The defect is, that they flatter only in print or in writing, but not by word of mouth: they will give things under their hand which they make a conscience of speaking. Besides, they are too libertine to haunt anti-chambers, too poor to bribe porters and footmen, and too proud to cringe to second-hand favourites in a great family. Tell me, are you not

under original sin by the dedication of your Eclogues to Lord Bolingbroke? I am an ill judge at this distance: and besides am, for my ease, utterly ignorant of the commonest things that pass in the world; but if all courts have a sameness in them (as the parsons phrase it) things may be as they were in my time, when all employments went to parliament-men's friends, who had been useful in elections, and there was always a huge list of names in arrears at the treasury, which would at least take up your seven years expedient to discharge even one half. I am of opinion, if you will not be offended, that the surest course would be to get your friend who lodgeth in your house to recommend you to the next chief governor who comes over here for a good civil employment, or to be one of his secretaries, which your parliamentmen are fond enough of, when there is no room at home. The wine is good and reasonable; you may dine twice a week at the deanery-house; there is a set of company in this town sufficient for one man; folks will admire you, because they have read you, and read of you; and a good employment will make you live tolerably in London, or sumptuously here; or if you divide between both places, it will be for your health.

I wish I could do more than say I love you. I left you in a good way both for the late court, and the successors; and by the force of too much honesty or too little sublunary wisdom, you fell between two stools. Take care of your health and

money; be less modest and more active; or else turn parson and get a bishopric here. Would to God they would send us as good ones from your side! I am ever, &c.

LETTER XLIII.

MR. POPE AND LORD BOLINGBROKE TO DR. SWIFT

Jan. 12, 1723.

I FIND a rebuke in a late letter of yours, that both stings and pleases me extremely. Your saying that I ought to have writ a postscript to my friend Gay's, makes me not content to write less than a whole letter; and your seeming to take his kindly, gives me hopes you will look upon this as a sincere effect of friendship. Indeed as I cannot but own the laziness with which you tax me, and with which I may equally charge you, for both of us have had (and one of us hath both had and given)* a surfeit of writing; so I really thought you would know yourself to be so certainly entitled to my friendship, that it was a possession you could not imagine stood in need of any further deeds or writings to assure you of it.

Whatever you seem to think of your withdrawn and separate state at this distance, and in this absence, Dean Swift lives still in England, in every place and company where he would chuse to live, * Alluding to his large work on Homer. Warburton.

and I find him in all the conversations I keep, and in all the hearts in which I desire any share.

We have never met these many years without mention of you. Besides my old acquaintance, I have found that all my friends of a later date are such as were yours before: Lord Oxford, Lord Harcourt, and Lord Harley, may look upon me as one entailed upon them by you.* Lord Bolingbroke is now returned (as I hope) to take me with all his other hereditary rights: and, indeed, he seems grown so much a philosopher, as to set his heart upon some of them as little, as upon the poet you gave him. It is sure my ill fate, that all those I most loved, and with whom I most lived, must be banished: after both of you left England, my constant host was the Bishop of Rochester.† Sure this is a nation that is cursedly afraid of being overrun with too much politeness, and cannot regain one great genius, but at the expense of another. I tremble for my Lord Peterborough (whom I now lodge with); he has too much wit, as well as courage, to make a solid general:|| and if

* This circumstance is curious, as it shews to whom Pope was primarily indebted for his introduction to Lords Oxford, Harcourt, and Bolingbroke. Bowles.

The Bishop of Rochester thought this to be indeed the case; and that the price agreed on for Lord B.'s return, was his banishment: an imagination which so strongly possessed him when he went abroad, that all the expostulations of his friends could not convince him of the folly of it. Warburton.

This Mr. Walsh seriously thought to be the case, where, in a letter to Mr. Pope, he says" When we were in the North,

he escapes being banished by others, I fear he will banish himself. This leads me to give you some account of the manner of my life and conversation, which has been infinitely more various and dissipated than when you knew me and cared for me; and among all sexes, parties, and professions. A glut of study and retirement in the first part of my life cast me into this; and this, I begin to see, will throw me again into study and retirement.

The civilities I have met with from opposite sets of people, have hindered me from being violent or sour to any party; but at the same time the observation and experience I cannot but have collected, have made me less fond of, and less surprized at any. I am therefore the more afflicted and the more angry at the violence and hardships I see practised by either. The merry vein you knew me in, is sunk into a turn of reflection, that has made the world pretty indifferent to me; and yet I have acquired a quietness of mind, which by fits improves into a certain degree of cheerfulness, enough to make me just so good-humoured as to wish that world well. My friendships are increased by new ones, yet no part of the warmth I felt for the old is diminished. Aversions I have none but

my Lord Wharton shewed me a letter he had received from a certain great general in Spain [Lord Peterb.]; I told him I would by all means have that general recalled, and set to writing here at home, for it was impossible that a man with so much wit as he shewed, could be fit to command an army, or do any other business."-Lett. V. Sept. 9, 1706. Warburton.