LETTER III.

Twitenham, Sept. 20, 1739.

I RECEIVED with great pleasure the paper you sent me and yet with greater, the prospect you give me of a nearer acquaintance with you when you come to town. I shall hope what part of your time you can afford me, amongst the number of those who esteem you, will be passed rather in this place than in London; since it is here only I live as I ought, mihi et amicis. I therefore depend on your promise; and so much as my constitution suffers by the winter, I yet assure you, such an acquisition will make the spring much the more welcome to me, when it is to bring you hither, cum zephyris et hirundine primâ.

As soon as Mr. R. can transmit to me an entire copy of your Letters, I wish he had your leave so to do; that I may put the book into the hands of a French gentleman to translate, who, I hope, will not subject your work to as much ill-grounded criticism as my French translator has subjected mine. In earnest, I am extremely obliged to you, for thus espousing the cause of a stranger whom you judged to be injured; but my part, in this sentiment, is the least. The generosity of your conduct deserves esteem, your zeal for truth deserves affection from every candid man; and as

* In reply to M. de Crousaz on the Essay on Man.

† Resnel, on whose faulty and absurd translation Crousaz founded his most plausible objection. Warburton.

such, were I wholly out of the case, I should esteem and love you for it. I will not therefore use you so ill as to write in the general style of compliment; it is below the dignity of the occasion : and I can only say (which I say with sincerity and warmth) that you have made me, &c.

LETTER IV.

January 4, 1789.

It is a real truth that I should have written to you oftener, if I had not a great respect for you, and owed not a great debt to you. But it may be no unnecessary thing to let you know that most of my friends also pay you their thanks; and some of the most knowing, as well as most candid judges think me as much beholden to you as I think myself. Your Letters meet from such with the approbation they merit, and I have been able to find but two or three very slight inaccuracies in the whole book, which I have, upon their observation, altered in an exemplar which I keep against a second edition. My very uncertain state of health, which is shaken more and more every winter, drove me to Bath and Bristol two months since; and I shall not return towards London till February. But I have received nine or ten letters from thence on the success of your book,* which they are earnest to have translated. One of them is begun in France. A French gentleman, about Monsieur * The commentary on the Essay on Man.

Warburton.

Cambis, the ambassador, hath done the greatest part of it here. But I will retard the impression till I have your directions, or till I can have the pleasure I earnestly wish for, to meet you in town, where you gave me some hopes you sometimes passed a part of the spring, for the best reason, I know, of ever visiting it, the conversation of a few friends. Pray suffer me to be what you have made me, one of them, and let my house have its share of you: or, if I can any way be instrumental in accommodating you in town during your stay, I have lodgings and a library or two in my disposal; which, I believe, I need not offer to a man to whom all libraries ought to be open, or to one who wants them so little; but that it is possible you may be as much a stranger to this town, as I wish with all my heart I was. I see by certain squibs in the Miscellanies,* that you have as much of the uncharitable spirit poured out upon you as the author you defended from Crousaz. I only wish you gave them no other answer than that of the sun to the frogs, shining out, in your second book, and the completion of your argument. No man is, as he ought to be, more, or so much a friend to your merit and character, as, Sir,

Your, &c.

* The Weekly Miscellany, by Dr. Webster, Dr. Waterland,

Dr. Stebbing, Mr. Venn, and others.

Warburton.

LETTER V.

January 17, 1739-40.

THOUGH I writ to you two posts ago, I ought to acknowledge now a new and unexpected favour of the Remarks on the fourth Epistle; which (though I find by yours attending them, they were sent last month) I received but this morning. This was occasioned by no fault of Mr. R., but the neglect, I believe, of the person to whose care he consigned them. I have been full three months about Bath and Bristol, endeavouring to amend a complaint which more or less has troubled me all my life: I hope the regimen this has obliged me to, will make the remainder of it more philosophical, and improve my resignation to part with it at last. I am preparing to return home, and shall then revise what my French gentleman has done, and add this to it. He is the same person who translated the Essay into prose, which Mr. Crousaz should have profited by, who, I am really afraid, when I lay the circumstances all together, was moved to his proceeding in so very unreasonable a way, by some malice either of his own, or some other's, though I was very willing, at first, to impute it to ignorance or prejudice. I see nothing to be added to your work; only some commendatory deviations from the argument itself, in my favour, I ought to think might be omitted.

I must repeat my urgent desire to be previously

* Of the Essay on Man.

Warburton.

VOL. X.

2 M

acquainted with the precise time of your visit to London; that I may have the pleasure to meet a man in the manner I would, whom I must esteem one of the greatest of my benefactors. I am, with the most grateful and affectionate regard,* &c.

LETTER VI.

April 16, 1740. You could not give me more pleasure than by your short letter, which acquaints me that I may hope to see you so soon. Let us meet like men who have been many years acquainted with each other, and whose friendship is not to begin, but

* What led M. de Crousaz and others, who have raised objections to the Essay on Man, into their misapprehensions respecting that poem, is the taking too narrow a view of the subject, and attributing too positive a meaning to particular passages which the author has afterwards modified, and which were intended by him to be taken with a reference to the whole. Thus in vindicating the course of Providence, and the established harmony of the universe, he rejects the conclusion which his adversaries have attempted to force upon him, of a compulsory and absolute necessity, and asserts the freedom of the human mind, and the consequent existence of vice and virtue; thereby considering the omniscience of the Deity and the freedom of human action as perfectly (although to us inexplicably) compatible with each othera sentiment which he has also expressed in his Universal Prayer: Yet taught us in this dark estate

To know the good from ill;

And binding nature fast in fate,

Left free the human will.

+ Their very first interview was in Lord Radnor's garden, just by Mr. Pope's at Twickenham. Dodsley was present; and was, he told me, astonished at the high compliments paid him by Pope as he approached him.

Warton.