soil are the best judges of what is for the advantage of the kingdom. If others had thought the same way, funds of credit and South-Sea projects would neither have been felt nor heard of.

I could never discover the necessity of suspending any law upon which the liberty of the most innocent persons depended; neither do I think this practice hath made the taste of arbitrary power so agreeable, as that we should desire to see it repeated. Every rebellion subdued and plot discovered, contribute to the firmer establishment of the prince. In the latter case, the knot of conspirators is entirely broke, and they are to begin their work anew under a thousand disadvantages: so that those diligent inquiries into remote and problematical guilt, with a new power of enforcing them by chains and dungeons to every person whose face a minister thinks fit to dislike, are not only opposite to that maxim, which declareth it better that ten guilty men should escape, than one innocent suffer; but likewise leave a gate wide open to the whole tribe of informers, the most accursed, and prostitute, and abandoned race, that God ever permitted to plague mankind.

It is true the Romans had a custom of chusing a dictator, during whose administration the power of other magistrates was suspended; but this was done upon the greatest emergencies; a war near their doors, or some civil dissension: for armies must be governed by arbitrary power. But when the virtue of that commonwealth gave place to

luxury and ambition, this very office of dictator became perpetual in the persons of the Cæsars and their successors, the most infamous tyrants that have any where appeared in story.

These are some of the sentiments I had relating to public affairs, while I was in the world. What they are at present, is of little importance either to that or myself; neither can I truly say I have any at all, or, if I had, I dare not venture to publish them for however orthodox they may be while I am now writing, they may become criminal enough to bring me into trouble before midsummer. And indeed I have often wished for some time past, that a political catechism might be published by authority four times a year, in order to instruct us how we are to speak, write, and act during the current quarter. I have by experience felt. the want of such an instructor; for, intending to make my court to some people on the prevailing side, by advancing certain old whiggish principles, which, it seems, had been exploded about a month before, I have passed for a disaffected person. I am not ignorant how idle a thing it is, for a man in obscurity to attempt defending his reputation as a writer, while the spirit of faction hath so universally possessed the minds of men, that they are not at leisure to attend any thing else. They will just give themselves time to libel and accuse me, but cannot spare a minute to hear my defence. So in a plot-discovering age, I have often known an innocent man seized and imprisoned, and forced to

lie several months in chains, while the ministers were not at leisure to hear his petition, until they had prosecuted and hanged the number they proposed.

All I can reasonably hope for by this letter, is to convince my friends, and others who are pleased to wish me well, that I have neither been so ill a subject nor so stupid an author, as I have been represented by the virulence of libellers, whose malice hath taken the same train in both, by fathering dangerous principles in government upon me, which I never maintained, and insipid productions, which I am not capable of writing. For, however I may have been soured by personal illtreatment, or by melancholy prospects for the public, I am too much a politician to expose my own safety by offensive words. And, if my genius and spirit be sunk by increasing years, I have at least enough discretion left, not to mistake the measure of my own abilities, by attempting subjects where those talents are necessary, which perhaps I may have lost with my youth.

*

* Swift, in one sentence only of his admirable Sentiments of a Church of England Man, demolished the slavish and absurd doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance. "Many of the clergy," says he, " and other learned men, mistook the object to which passive obedience was due. By the supreme magistrate is properly understood the legislative power, which in all governments must be absolute and unlimited. But the word magistrate seeming to denote a single person, and to express the executive power, it came to pass that the obedience due to the legislature was, for want of knowing or considering this easy distinction, misapplied to the administration." Warton.

LETTER XXXIV.

MR. POPE TO THE REV. MR. BERKLEY.

DEAR SIR,

Sunday.

My Lord Bishop Atterbury was very much concerned at missing you yesterday. He desired me to engage you and myself to dine with him this day; but I was unluckily pre-engaged. And (upon my telling him I should carry you out of town tomorrow, and hoped to keep you till the end of the week) he has desired that we will not fail to dine with him the next Sunday, when he will have no other company.

I write you this to entreat you will provide yourself of linen and other necessaries sufficient for the week; for as I take you to be almost the only friend I have, that is above the little vanities of the town, I expect you may be able to renounce it for one week, and to make trial how you like my Tusculum; because, I assure you, it is no less yours, and hope you will use it as your own country villa the ensuing season. I am yours, &c.

LETTER XXXV.

MR. POPE TO MR. GAY.*

(1722.†)

I FAITHFULLY assure you, in the midst of that melancholy with which I have been so long encompassed, in an hourly expectation almost of my mother's death, there was no circumstance that rendered it more unsupportable to me, than that I could not leave her to see you. Your own present escape from so imminent danger I pray God may prove less precarious than my poor mother's can be; whose life at best can be but a short reprieve, or a longer dying. But I fear even that is more than God will please to grant me; for these two days past her most dangerous symptoms are returned upon her; and, unless there be a sudden change, I must in a few days, if not in a few hours, be deprived of her. In the afflicting prospect before me, I know nothing that can so much alleviate it as the view now given me (Heaven grant it may increase!) of your recovery. In the sincerity of my heart, I am excessively concerned, not to be able to pay you, dear Gay, any part of the debt, I very gratefully remember, I owe you

* Vide Swift's Works, xvi. 423.

This and the two following letters appear without a date; but were certainly written during the residence of Gay at Hampstead, whither he had retired for the recovery of his health, which is said to have been much affected by the loss of some South-sea stock presented to him by Secretary Craggs.