scene of action open before us: towards our exit, this scene of action is or should be closed; and then, methinks, it is unbecoming to grow fonder of a thing which we have no longer occasion for. If it is pleasant, the sooner we are in possession of fame the longer we shall enjoy this pleasure. When it is acquired early in life, it may tickle us on till old age: but when it is acquired late, the sensation of pleasure will be more faint, and mingled with the regret of our not having tasted it sooner.

From my Farm, Oct. 5.

I am here; I have seen Pope, and one of my first inquiries was after you. He tells me a thing I am sorry to hear: you are building, it seems, on a piece of land you have acquired for that purpose, in some county of Ireland. Though I have built in a part of the world, which I prefer very little to that where you have been thrown and confined by our ill fortune and yours, yet I am sorry you do the same thing. I have repented a thousand times of my resolution, and I hope you will repent of yours before it is executed. Adieu, my old and worthy friend; may the physical evils of life fall as easily upon you, as ever they did on any man who lived to be old; and may the moral evils which surround us, make as little impression on you, as they ought to make on one who has such superior sense to estimate things by, and so much virtue to wrap himself up in!

My wife desires not to be forgotten by you;

she is faithfully your servant, and zealously your admirer. She will be concerned and disappointed not to find you in this island at her return, which hope both she and I had been made to entertain before I went abroad.

LETTER XC.

DR. SWIFT TO LORD BOLINGBROKE.

Dublin, October 31, 1729.

I RECEIVED your lordship's travelling letter of several dates, at several stages, and from different nations, languages, and religions. Neither could any thing be more obliging than your kind remembrance of me in so many places. As to your ten lustres, I remember, when I complained in a letter to Prior, that I was fifty years old, he was half angry in jest, and answered me out of Terence, ista commemoratio est quasi exprobratio. How then ought I to rattle you, when I have a dozen years more to answer for, all monastically passed in this country of liberty and delight, and money, and good company! I go on answering your letter: it is you were my hero, but the other* never was; yet if he were, it was your own fault, who taught me to love him, and often vindicated him,†

This is a remarkable sentence; as it conveys a depreciating idea of Lord Oxford, whom we had imagined Swift preferred to Bolingbroke.

Warton.

in the beginning of your ministry, from my accusations. But I granted he had the greatest inequalities of any man alive, and his whole scene was fifty times more a What-d'ye-call-it than yours: for, I declare yours was unie, and I wish you would so order it, that the world may be as wise as I upon that article: Mr. Pope wishes it too, and I believe there is not a more honest man in England, even without wit. But you regard us not.— I was forty-seven years old when I began to think of death, and the reflections upon it now begin when I wake in the morning, and end when I am going to sleep.-I writ to Mr. Pope, and not to you. My birth, although from a family not undistinguished in its name, is many degrees inferior to yours; all my pretensions from person and parts infinitely so; I a younger son of younger sons; you born to a great fortune: yet I see you, with all your advantages, sunk to a degree that you could never have been without them; but yet I see you as much esteemed, as much beloved, as much dreaded, and perhaps more (though it be almost impossible) than ever you were in your highest exaltation-only I grieve like an alderman that you are not so rich. And yet, my lord, I pretend to value money as little as you, and I will call five hundred witnesses (if you will take Irish witnesses) to prove it. I renounce your whole philosophy, because it is not your practice. By the figure of living, (if I used that expression to Mr. Pope,) I

*The year

of Queen Anne's death.

Warburton.

do not mean the parade, but a suitableness to your mind and as for the pleasure of giving, I know your soul suffers when you are debarred of it. Could you, when your own generosity and contempt of outward things, (be not offended, it is no Ecclesiastical, but an Epictetian phrase,) could you, when these have brought you to it, come over and live with Mr. Pope and me at the deanery? I could almost wish the experiment was triedNo, God forbid, that ever such a scoundrel as Want should dare to approach you. But, in the mean time, do not brag; retrenchments are not your talent. But as old Weymouth said to me in his lordly latin, Philosopha verba, ignava opera : I wish you could learn arithmetic, that three and two make five, and will never make more. My philosophical spectacles which you advise me to, will tell me that I can live on 50l. a-year, (wine excluded, which my bad health forces me to,) but I cannot endure that Otium should be sine dignitate. My lord, what I would have said of fame is meant of fame which a man enjoys in his life; because I cannot be a great lord, I would acquire what is a kind of subsidium, I would endeavour that my betters should seek me by the merit of something distinguishable, instead of my seeking them. The desire of enjoying it in after-times is owing to the spirit and folly of youth: but with age we learn to know the house is so full, that there is no room for above one or two at most in

an age, through the whole world.* My lord, I hate and love to write to you, it gives me pleasure, and kills me with melancholy. The D-take stupidity, that it will not come to supply the want of philosophy.

LETTER XCI.

DR. SWIFT TO MR. POPE.

Oct. 31, 1729.

You were so careful of sending me the Dunciad, that I have received five of them, and have pleased four friends. I am one of every body who approve every part of it, text and comment; but am one abstracted from every body, in the happiness of being recorded your friend, while wit, and humour, and politeness shall have any memorial among us. As for your octavo edition, we know nothing of it, for we have an octavo of our own, which hath sold wonderfully, considering our poverty, and dulness the consequence of it.

* When Bolingbroke was very old, in his retirement at Battersea, it was customary for many people to pay their respects to him, chiefly with the view of seeing and conversing with a character so distinguished. Among others, Lord Chatham, then a young man, called on him; but found him pedantic, fretful, angry with his wife, &c. Such is the melancholy picture of the last stage of existence. [Communicated by Lord Chatham to the late Marquis of Lansdowne.]

Bowles.