LETTER CLI. DR. SWIFT TO MR. POPE. February 9, 1735-6. I CANNOT properly call you my best friend, be cause I have not another left who deserves the name; such a havoc have Time,* Death, Exile, and Oblivion made. Perhaps you would have fewer complaints of my ill health and lowness of spirits, if they were not some excuse for my delay of writing even to you. It is perfectly right what you say of the indifference in common friends, whether we are sick or well, happy or miserable. The very maid servants in a family have the same notion: I have heard them often say, Oh, I am very sick, if any body cared for it! I am vexed when my visitors come with the compliment usual here, Mr. Dean, I hope you are very well. My popularity that you mention, is wholly confined to the common people, who are more constant than those we miscall their betters. I walk the streets, and so do my lower friends, from whom, and from whom alone, I have a thousand hats and blessings upon old scores, which those we call the gentry * All these last letters of Swift are curious and interesting, as they give us an account of the gradual decay of his intellect, and temper, and strength of mind and body; and fill us with many melancholy but useful reflections. We see the steps by which this great genius sunk into discontent, into peevishness, into indignation, into torpor, into insanity! Warton. have forgot. But I have not the love, or hardly the civility, of any one man in power or station; and I can boast that I neither visit nor am acquainted with any Lord Temporal or Spiritual in the whole kingdom; nor am able to do the least good office to the most deserving man, except what I can dispose of in my own Cathedral upon a vacancy. What hath sunk my spirits more than even years and sickness, is reflecting on the most execrable corruptions that run through every branch of public management. I heartily thank you for those lines translated, Singula de nobis anni, &c.* You have put them in a strong and admirable light; but however I am so partial, as to be more delighted with those which are to do me the greatest honour I shall ever receive from posterity, and will outweigh the malignity of ten thousand enemies. I never saw them before, by which it is plain that the letter you sent me miscarried--I do not doubt that you have choice of new acquaintance, and some of them may be deserving; for youth is the season of virtue; corruptions grow with years, and I believe the oldest rogue in England is the greatest. You have years enough before you to watch whether these new acquaintance will keep their virtue, when they leave you and go into the world; how * The circling years on human pleasures prey, + His new acquaintance were, probably, Lyttleton, Murray, Lord Cornbury, &c. Bowles. long will their spirit of independency last against the temptations of future ministers, and future kings. As to the new lord lieutenant, I never knew any of the family; so that I shall not be able to get any job done by him for any deserving friend. LETTER CLII. DR. SWIFT TO MR. POPE. February 7, 1735-6. It is some time since I dined at the Bishop of Derry's, where Mr. Secretary Cary told me with great concern, that you were taken very ill. I have heard nothing since, only I have continued in great pain of mind, yet for my own sake and the world's more than for yours; because I well know how little you value life both as a philosopher and a Christian, particularly the latter, wherein hardly one in a million of us heretics can equal you. If you are well recovered, you ought to be reproached for not putting me especially out of pain, who could not bear the loss of you; although we must be for ever distant, as much as if I were in the grave, for which my years and continual indisposition are preparing me every season. I have staid too long from pressing you to give me some ease by an account of your health; pray do not use me so ill any more. I look upon you as an estate from which I receive my best annual rents, al though I am never to see it. Mr. Tickel was at the same meeting under the same real concern; and so were a hundred others of this town, who had never seen you. I read to the Bishop of Derry the paragraph in your letter which concerned him, and his lordship expressed his thankfulness in a manner that became him. He is esteemed here as a person of learning and conversation and humanity, but he is beloved by all people. I have nobody now left but you: pray be so kind to out-live me, and then die as soon as you please, but without pain; and let us meet in a better place, if my religion will permit, but rather my virtue, although much unequal to yours. Pray, let my Lord Bathurst know how much I love him; I still insist on his remembering me, although he is too much in the world to honour an absent friend with his letters. My state of health is not to boast of; my giddiness is more or less too constant; I sleep ill, and have a poor appetite. I can as easily write a poem in the Chinese language as my own. I am as fit for matrimony as invention; and yet I have daily schemes for innumerable essays in prose, and proceed sometimes to no less than half a dozen lines, which the next morning become waste paper. What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen of years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them, as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Pray, put me out of fear as soon as you can, about that report of your illness; and let me know who this Cheselden* is, that hath so lately sprung up in your favour? Give me also some account of your neighbourt who writ to me from Bath. I hear he resolves to be strenuous for taking off the test; which grieves me extremely, from all the unprejudiced reasons I ever was able to form, and against the maxims of all wise Christian governments, which always had some established religion, leaving at best a toleration to others. Farewel, my dearest friend! ever, and upon every account that can create friendship and esteem. LETTER CLIII. MR. POPE TO DR. SWIFT. March 25, 1736. If ever I write more epistles in verse, one of them shall be addressed to you. I have long concerted it, and begun it, but I would make what bears your name as finished as my last work ought to be, that is to say, more finished than any of the rest. The subject is large, and will divide into four Epistles, which naturally follow the Essay on Man, viz. 1. Of the Extent and Limits of Human Reason and Science. 2. A View of the useful and * The celebrated surgeon and anatomist. + Allen of Prior park. |