fion. Prudence will make us defire Fame, because it gives us many real and great advantages in all the affairs of life. Fame is the wife man's means; his ends are his own good, and the good of fociety. You Poets and Orators have inverted this order; you propofe Fame as the end; and good, or at least great actions, as the means. You go further: You teach our self-love to anticipate the applaufe which we suppose will be paid by pofterity to our names; and with idle notions of immortality you turn other heads befides your own: I am afraid this may have done fome harm in the world.

Fame is an object which men purfue fuccessfully by various and even contrary courfes. Your doctrine leads them to look on this end as effential, and on the means as indifferent; fo that Fabricius and Craffus, Cato and Cæfar prefied forward to the fame goal. After all perhaps it may appear, from a confideration of the depravity of mankind, that you could do no better, nor keep up virtue in the world without calling this paffion or this direction of felf-love, in to your aid: Tacitus has crowded this excufe for you, according to his manner, into a maxim, Contemptu fama, contemni virtutes. But now whether we confider Fame as an useful instru̟ment in all the occurrences of private and public life, or whether we confider it as the cause of that pleasure which our felf-love is fo fond of; methinks our entrance into life, or (to speak more properly) our youth, not our old age, is the feafon

when

when we ought to defire it most, and therefore when it is most becoming to defire it with ardor. If it is ufeful, it is to be defired most when we have, or may hope to have, a long ícene of action open before us: Towards our exit, this fcene of action is or should be closed; and then, methinks, it is unbecoming to grow fonder of a thing which we have no longer occafion for. If it is pleasant, the fooner we are in poffeffion of fame the longer we shall enjoy this pleafure. When it is acquired early in life it may tickle us on till old age; but when it is acquired late, the fenfation of pleasure will be more faint, and mingled with the regret of our not having tasted it sooner.

From my Farm, O&. 5.

I am here; I have seen Pope, and one of my first enquiries was after you. He tells me a thing I am forry to hear: You are building, it feems, on a piece of land you have acquired for that purpose, in fome county of Ireland. Tho' 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 forry you do the fame thing. I have repented a thousand times of my refolution, and I hope you will repent of yours before it is executed. Adieu, my old and worthy friend; may the phyfical evils of life fall as eafily upon you, as ever they did on any man who lived to be old; and may the moral evils which furround us, make as little impreffion on you, as they ought to make on one who has fuch fuperior fenfe to estimate things by, and fo much virtue to wrap himself up in.

My

My wife defires not to be forgotten by you; fhe's 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 fhe and I had been made to entertain before I went abroad.

I

LETTER XLI.

Dr. SWIFT to Lord BOLINGBROKE.

Dublin, Oct. 31, 1729.

Receiv'd your Lordship's travelling letter of feveral 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 fo many places. As to your ten Luftres, I remember, when I complained in a Letter to Prior, that I was fifty years old, he was half angry in jeft, and anfwered me out of Terence, ifta commemoratio eft quafi exprobratio. How then ought I to rattle you, when I have a dozen years more to answer for, all monaftically paffed in this Country of liberty and delight, and money, and good company! I go on anfwering your letter; It is you were my Hero, but the other n ver was ; yet if he were, it was your own fault, who taught me to love him, and often vindicated him, in the beginning of your miniftry, from my accu

* L. Ox.

fations.

*

fations. 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 fo order it, that the world may be as wife as I upon that article: Mr. Pope wishes it too, and I believe there is not a more honeft 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 fleep.-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 your's; all my pretenfions from perfon and parts infinitely I a younger fon of younger fons ; you born to great fortune: yet I fee you with all your advantages, funk to a degree that you could never have been without them: But yet I fee you as much esteemed, as much beloved, as much dreaded, and perhaps more (though it be almoft impoffible) than ever you were in your higheft exaltation---only I grieve like an Alderman that you are not fo rich. And yet, my Lord, I pretend to value money as little as you, and I will call five hundred witneffes (if you will take Irish witnesses) to prove it. I renounce your whole philofophy, because it is not your practice. By the figure of living, (if I ufed

fo;

a

*The Year of Queen Anne's Death,

that

that expreffion to Mr. Pope) I do not mean the parade, but a fuitablenefs to your mind ; and as for the pleafure of giving, I know your soul suffers when you are debarr'd of it. Could you, when your own generofity and contempt of outward things (be not offended, it is no Ecclefiaftical 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 almoft with the experiment were tried---No, God forbid, that ever fuch a fcoundrel as Want fhould dare to approach you. But, in the mean time, do not brag, Retrenchments are not your talent. But, as old Weymouth faid to me in his Lordly Latin, Philofopha verba, ignava opera; I wish you could learn Arithmetic, that three and two make five, and will never make more. My philofophical fpectacles which you advise me to, will tell me that I can live on 507. a year (wine excluded, which my bad health forces me to) but I cannot endure that Otium fhould be fine dignitate. ---My Lord, what I would have faid 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 fubfidium, I would endeavour that my betters fhould feek me by the merit of fomething distinguishable, inftead of my feeking them. The defire of enjoying it in after-times is owing to the fpirit and folly of youth: but with age we learn to know the house is fo full, that there is no room for above one or two at most in an age, through the whole