happiness here, which would make life more desirable, and death too dreadful. I hope you have now one advantage that you always wanted before, and the want of which made your friends as uneasy as it did yourself; I mean the removal of that solicitude about your own affairs, which perpetually filled your thoughts and disturbed your conversation. For if it be true what Mr. Pope seriously tells me, you will have opportunity of saving every groat of the interest you receive; and so by the time he and you grow weary of each other, you will be able to pass the rest of your wineless life in ease and plenty, with the additional triumphal comfort of never having received a penny from those tasteless ungrateful people from whom you deserved so much, and who deserve no better geniuses than those by whom they are celebrated. If you see Mr. Cesar, present my humble service to him, and let him know that the scrub libel printed against me here, and reprinted in London, for which he showed a kind concern to a friend of us both, was written by myself, and sent to a Whig-printer: it was in the style and genius of such scoundrels, when the humour of libelling ran in this strain against a friend of mine whom you know—but my paper is ended.

LETTER CIV.

DR. SWIFT TO MR. GAY.

Dublin, Nov. 19, 1730.

I WRIT to you a long letter about a fortnight past, concluding you were in London, from whence I understood one of your former was dated: nor did I imagine you were gone back to Amesbury so late in the year, at which season I take the country to be only a scene for those who have been ill used by a court on account

1

of their virtues; which is a state of happiness the more valuable, because it is not accompanied by envy, although nothing deserves it more. I would gladly sell a dukedom to lose favour in the manner their Graces have done. I believe my Lord Carteret 2, since he is no longer Lieutenant, may not wish me ill, and I have told him often that I only hated him as Lieutenant: I confess he had a genteeler manner of binding the chains of this kingdom than most of his predecessors, and I confess at the same time, that he had, six times, a regard to my recommendation, by preferring so many of my friends in the church; the two last acts of his favour were to add to the dignities of Dr. Delany and Mr. Stopford, the last of whom was by you and Mr. Pope put into Mr. Pulteney's hands. I told you in

1 After the amazing success of the Beggars' Opera, Gay produced another, with the name (which was now become so popular) of Polly. This, as it was supposed to contain severe and pointed sarcasms on the Court, and those in power, was forbid to be acted by the Lord Chamberlain. In consequence of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry's warmly taking up Gay's cause, they were forbid the Court. The following highspirited letter was sent by the Duchess to the King and Queen, copies of which were generally circulated:

"That the Duchess of Queensberry is surprised, and well pleased, that the King has given her so agreeable a cominand as to stay from Court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a great civility upon the King and Queen.

"She hopes, by such an unprecedented order as this, that the King will see as few as he wishes at his Court, particularly such as dare to think, or speak truth: I dare not do otherwise, nor ought not; nor could have imagined, that it would not have been the very highest compliment I could possibly pay the King, to endeavour to support truth and innocence in his house.

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"C. QUEENSBERRY."

Particularly when the King and Queen had both told me that they had not read Mr. Gay's play. I have certainly done right then to stand by my own word, rather than by his Grace of Grafton's, who has neither made use of truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either for himself or his friends."

[Dodington Papers, March the 4th, 1728-9.]-Bowles.

2 The lines which he quoted from Homer, on his death-bed, to Mr. Wood, on occasion of the peace, were as happily applied, as the apology he used to Swift for some harsh measures in Ireland:

Regni novitas me talia cogit
Moliri.

Warton.

my last, that a continuance of giddiness (though not in a violent degree) prevented my thoughts of England at present. For in my case a domestic life is necessary, where I can with the Centurion say to my servants, Go, and he goeth, and Do this, and he doth it. I now hate all people whom I cannot command, and consequently a Duchess is at this time the hatefullest lady in the world to me, one only excepted, and I beg her Grace's pardon for that exception; for, in the way I mean, her Grace is ten thousand times more hateful. I confess I begin to apprehend you will squander my money, because I hope you never less wanted it; and if you go on with success for two years longer, I fear I shall not have a farthing of it left. The Doctor hath ill-informed me, who says that Mr. Pope is at present the chief poetical favourite, yet Mr. Pope himself talks like a philosopher, and one wholly retired. But the vogue of our few honest folks here is, that Duck is absolutely to succeed Eusden in the laurel, the contention being between Concanen or Theobald, or some other hero of the Dunciad. I never charged you for not talking, but the dubious state of your affairs in those days was too much the subject, and I wish the Duchess had been the voucher of your amendment. Nothing so much contributed to my ease as the turn of affairs after the Queen's death; by which all my hopes being cut off, I could have no ambition left, unless I would have been a greater rascal than happened to suit with my temper. I therefore sat down quietly at my morsel, adding only thereto a principle of hatred to all succeeding measures and ministries, by way of sauce to relish my meat: and I confess one point of conduct in my Lady Duchess's life hath added much poignancy to it. There is a good Irish practical bull towards the end of your letter, where you spend a dozen lines in telling me you must

leave off, that you may give my Lady Duchess room to write, and so you proceed to within two or three lines of the bottom; though I would have remitted you my 2007. to have left place for as many more.

Madam,

TO THE DUCHESS.

My beginning thus low is meant as a mark of respect, like receiving your Grace at the bottom of the stairs. I am glad you know your duty; for it hath been a known and established rule above twenty years in England, that the first advances have been constantly made me by all ladies who aspired to my acquaintance, and the greater their quality, the greater were their advances. Yet, I know not by what weakness, I have condescended graciously to dispense with you upon this important article. Though Mr. Gay will tell you that a nameless person sent me eleven messages 2 before I would yield to a visit: I mean a person to whom he is infinitely obliged, for being the occasion of the happiness he now enjoys under the protection and favour of my Lord Duke and your Grace. At the same time, I cannot forbear telling you, Madam, that you are a little imperious in your manner of making your advances. You say, perhaps you shall not like me; I affirm you are mistaken, which I can plainly demonstrate; for I have certain intelligence, that another person dislikes me of late, with whose likings yours have not for some time past gone together. However, if I shall once have the honour to attend your Grace, I will out of fear and prudence appear as vain as I can, that I may not know your thoughts of me. This is your own direction, but

3 He means Queen Caroline; and her neglect of Gay, which recommended him to the Duchess of Queensberry.-Warton.

it was needless. For Diogenes himself would be vain, to have received the honour of being one moment of his life in the thoughts of your Grace.

i

LETTER CV.

LORD BOLINGBROKE TO DR. SWIFT.

Jan. 17, 1730-31.

BEGIN my letter by telling you that my wife has been returned from abroad about a month, and that her health, though feeble and precarious, is better than it has been these two years. She is much your servant, and as she has been her own physician with some success, imagines she could be yours with the same.

Would to God you was within her reach! She would, I believe, prescribe a great deal of the medicina animi, without having recourse to the books of Trismegistus. Pope and I should be her principal apothecaries in the course of the cure; and though our best botanists complain, that few of the herbs and simples which go to the composition of these remedies, are to be found at present in our soil, yet there are more of them here than in Ireland; besides, by the help of a little chemistry, the most noxious juices may become salubrious, and rank poison a specific. Pope is now in my library with me, and writes to the world, to the present and to future ages, whilst I begin this letter which he is to finish to you. What good he will do to mankind I know not; this comfort he may be sure of, he cannot do less than you have done before him *. I have sometimes thought, that if preachers, hangmen, and moral-writers keep vice at a stand, or so much as

This is a strange assertion to be made to Swift, who prided himself on his labours to improve mankind by the severity of his discipline; but perhaps Lord Bolingbroke meant to refer to Swift's inefficient attempts to reconcile the ministers shortly prior to the death of Queen Anne.