LETTER XCVIII.

MR. POPE TO MR. GAY.

Sept. 11, 1730. I MAY with great truth return your speech, that I think of you daily; oftener indeed than is consistent with the character of a reasonable man, who is rather to make himself easy with the things and men that are about him, than uneasy for those which he wants. And you, whose absence is in a manner perpetual to me, ought rather to be remembered as a good man gone, than breathed after as one living. You are taken from us here to be laid up in a more blessed state, with spirits of a higher kind: such I reckon his Grace and her Grace since their banishment from an earthly court to a heavenly one, in each other and their friends; for, I conclude, none but true friends will consort or associate with them afterwards. I cannot but look upon myself (so unworthy as a man of Twit'nam seems, to be ranked with such rectified and sublimated beings as you) as a separated spirit too from courts and courtly fopperies; but, I own, not altogether so divested of terrene matter, not altogether so spiritualized, as to be worthy of admission to your depths of retirement and contentment. I am tugged back to the world and its regards too often; and no wonder, when my retreat is but ten miles from the capital. I am within ear-shot of reports, within the vortex of lies and censures. I hear sometimes of the lampooners of beauty, the calumniators of virtue, the jokers at reason and religion. I presume these are creatures and things as unknown to you, as we of this dirty orb are to the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter; except a few fervent prayers reach you on the wings of the post, from two or three of your zealous votaries at this distance; as

one Mrs. H. who lifts up her heart now and then to you, from the midst of the colluvies and sink of human greatness at W-r; one Mrs. B. that fancies you may remember her while you lived in your mortal and too transitory state at Petersham; one Lord B., who admired the Duchess before she grew a goddess; and a few others.

To descend now to tell you what are our wants, our complaints, and our miseries here, I must seriously say, the loss of any one good woman is too great to be borne easily and poor Mrs. Rollinson, though a private woman, was such. Her husband is gone into Oxfordshire very melancholy, and thence to the Bath, to live on, for such is our fate and duty. Adieu. Write to me as often as you will, and (to encourage you) I will write as seldom as if did not. Believe me, you

DEAR SIR,

LETTER XCIX.

MR. POPE TO MR. GAY.

Your, &c.

October 1, 1730.

I AM something like the sun at this season, withdrawing from the world, but meaning it mighty well, and resolving to shine whenever I can again. But I fear the clouds of a long winter will overcome me to such a degree, that any body will take a farthing candle for a better guide, and more serviceable company. My friends may remember my brighter days, but will think (like the Irishman) that the moon is a better thing when once I am gone. I do not say this with any allusion to my poetical capacity as a son of Apollo, but in my companionable one, (if you will suffer me to use a phrase of the Earl of Clarendon's,) for I shall see or be seen of few of you this winter. I am grown too faint to do any good, or to give any pleasure. I not

VOL. VIII.

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only, as Dryden finely says, feel my notes decay as a poet, but feel my spirits flag as a companion, and shall return again to where I first began, my books. I have been putting my library in order, and enlarging the chimney in it, with equal intention to warm my mind and body, if I can, to some life. A friend (a woman friend, God help me!) with whom I have spent three or four hours a day these fifteen years, advised me to pass more time in my studies: I reflected, she must have found some reason for this admonition, and concluded she would complete all her kindnesses to me by returning me to the employment I am fittest for; conversation with the dead, the old, and the wormeaten.

Judge therefore if I might not treat you as a beatified spirit, comparing your life with my stupid state; for as to my living at Windsor with the ladies, &c. it is all a dream; I was there but two nights, and all the day out of that company. I shall certainly make as little court to others as they do to me; and that will be none at all. My fair-weather friends of the summer are going away for London, and I shall see them and the butterflies together, if I live till next year; which I would not desire to do, if it were only for their sakes. But we that are writers, ought to love posterity, that posterity may love us; and I would willingly live to see the children of the present race, merely in hope they may be a little wiser than their parents. I am, &c.

LETTER C.

MR. POPE TO MR. GAY.

It is true that I write to you very seldom, and have no pretence of writing which satisfies me, because I

have nothing to say that can give you much pleasure: only merely that I am in being, which in truth is of little consequence to one from whose conversation I am cut off by such accidents or engagements as separate us. I continue, and ever shall, to wish you all good and happiness: I wish that some lucky event might set you in a state of ease and independency all at once; and that I might live to see you as happy as this silly world and fortune can make any one. Are we never to live together more, as once we did? I find my life ebbing apace, and my affections strengthening as my age increases; not that I am worse, but better, in my health than last winter; but my mind finds no amendment nor improvement, nor support to lean upon, from those about me: and so I find myself leaving the world, as fast as it leaves me. Companions I have enough, friends few, and those too warm in the concerns of the world, for me to bear pace with; or else so divided from me, that they are but like the dead whose remembrance I hold in honour. Nature, temper, and habit from my youth made me have but one strong desire all other ambitions, my person, education, constitution, religion, &c. conspired to remove far from me. That desire was, to fix and preserve a few lasting, dependable friendships: and the accidents which have disappointed me in it, have put a period to all my aims. So I am sunk into an idleness, which makes me neither care nor labour to be noticed by the rest of mankind: I propose no rewards to myself, and why should I take any sort of pains? Here I sit and sleep, and probably here I shall sleep till I sleep for ever, like the old man of Verona. I hear of what passes in the busy world with so little attention, that I forget it the next day; and as to the learned world, there is nothing passes in it. I have no more to add, but that I am, with the same truth as ever, Your, &c.

LETTER CI.

MR. POPE TO MR. GAY.

October 23, 1730.

YOUR letter is a very kind one, but I cannot say so pleasing to me as many of yours have been, through the account you give of the dejection of your spirits. I wish the too constant use of water does not contribute to it; I find Dr. Arbuthnot and another very knowing physician of that opinion. I also wish you were not so totally immersed in the country; I hope your return to town will be a prevalent remedy against the evil of too much recollection. I wish it partly for my own sake. We have lived little together of late, and we want to be physicians for one another. It is a remedy that agreed very well with us both, for many years, and I fancy our constitutions would mend upon the old medicine of studiorum similitudo, &c. I believe we both of us want whetting; there are several here who will do you that good office, merely for the love of wit, which seems to be bidding the town a long and last adieu. I can tell you of no one thing worth reading, or seeing; the whole age seems resolved to justify the Dunciad, and it may stand for a public epitaph or monumental inscription like that at Thermopyla, on a whole people perished! There may indeed be a wooden image or two of poetry set up, to preserve the memory that there once were bards in Britain; and (like the giants in Guildhall) show the bulk and bad taste of our ancestors: at present the poor Laureat and Stephen Duck serve for this purpose; a drunken sot of a Parson holds forth the emblem of inspiration, and an honest industrious Thresher not unaptly represents pains and labour. I hope this phenomenon of

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