my Lord Peterborough (whom I now lodge with); he has too much wit, as well as courage, to make a solid general: and if he escapes being banished by others, I fear he will banish himself. This leads me to give you some account of the manner of my life and conversation, which has been infinitely more various and dissipated than when you knew me and cared for me; and among all sexes, parties, and professions. A glut of study and retirement in the first part of my life cast me into this; and this, I begin to see, will throw me again into study and retirement.

The civilities I have met with from opposite sets of people, have hindered me from being violent or sour to any party; but at the same time the observation and experience I cannot but have collected, have made me less fond of, and less surprised at any. I am therefore the more afflicted and the more angry at the violence and hardships I see practised by either. The merry vein you knew me in, is sunk into a turn of reflection, that has made the world pretty indifferent to me; and yet I have acquired a quietness of mind, which by fits improves into a certain degree of cheerfulness, enough to make me just so good-humoured as to wish that world well. My friendships are increased by new ones, yet no part of the warmth I felt for the old is diminished. Aversions I have none but to knaves (for fools I have learned to bear with), and such I cannot be commonly civil to; for I think those men are next to knaves who converse with them. The greatest man in power of this sort shall hardly make me bow to him, unless I had a

This Mr. Walsh seriously thought to be the case, where, in a letter to Mr. Pope, he says-" When we were in the North, my Lord Wharton showed me a letter he had received from a certain great general in Spain [Lord Peterb.]; I told him I would by all means have that general recalled, and set to writing here at home, for it was impossible that a man with so much wit as he showed, could be fit to command an army, or do any other business." Lett. V. Sept. 9, 1706.-Warburton.

personal obligation, and that I will take care not to have. The top pleasure of my life is one I learned from you both how to gain and how to use; the freedom of friendship with men much my superiors. To have pleased great men, according to Horace, is a praise; but not to have flattered them, and yet not have displeased them, is a greater. I have carefully avoided all intercourse with poets and scribblers, unless where by great chance I have found a modest one. By these means I have had no quarrels with any personally; none have been enemies, but who were also strangers to me: and as there is no great need of eclaircissement with such, whatever they writ or said I never retaliated, not only never seeming to know, but often really never knowing, any thing of the matter. There are very few things that give me the anxiety of a wish; the strongest I have would be to pass my days with you, and a few such as you; but fate has dispersed them all about the world and I find to wish it is as vain, as to wish to see the millennium, and the kingdom of the just upon earth.

If I have sinned in my long silence, consider there is one to whom you yourself have been as great a sinner. As soon as you see his hand, you will learn to do me justice, and feel in your heart how long a man may be silent to those he truly loves and respects.

I am not so lazy as Pope, and therefore you must not expect from me the same indulgence to laziness; in defending his own cause he pleads yours, and becomes your advocate while he appeals to you as his judge. You will do the same on your part; and I, and the rest of your common friends, shall have great justice to expect from two such righteous tribunals; you

resemble perfectly the two alehouse-keepers in Holland, who were at the same time burgomasters of the town, and taxed one another's bills alternately. I declare beforehand I will not stand to the award; my title to your friendship is good, and wants neither deeds nor writings to confirm it; but annual acknowledgments at least are necessary to preserve it: and I begin to suspect by your defrauding me of them, that you hope in time to dispute it, and to urge prescription against me. I would not say one word to you about myself (since it is a subject on which you appear to have no curiosity), was it not to try how far the contrast between Pope's fortune, and manner of life, and mine, may be carried.

I have been, then, infinitely more uniform and less dissipated than when you knew me and cared for me. That love which I used to scatter with some profusion among the female kind, has been these many years devoted to one object'. A great many misfortunes (for so they are called, though sometimes very improperly) and a retirement from the world, have made that just and nice discrimination between my acquaintance and my friends, which we have seldom sagacity enough to make for ourselves; those insects of various hues, which used to hum and buzz about me while I stood in the sunshine, have disappeared since I lived in the shade. No man comes to a hermitage but for the sake of the hermit; a few philosophical friends come often to mine, and they are such as you would be glad to live with, if a dull climate and duller company have not altered you extremely from what you was nine years ago.

1 Bolingbroke's first wife, with whom he lived unhappily, was descended from the famous Jack of Newbery. Notwithstanding his lordship's former gallantries, no one was more sincerely and affectionately attached afterwards to his wife.-Bowles.

This second wife was the Marchioness de Villette, niece to the celebrated Madame Maintenon.-Sir Walter Scott.

The hoarse voice of party was never heard in this quiet place; gazettes and pamphlets are banished from it, and if the lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff be admitted, this distinction is owing to some strokes by which it is judged that this illustrious philosopher had (like the Indian Fohu, the Grecian Pythagoras, the Persian Zoroaster, and others his precursors among the Zabians, Magians, and the Egyptian Seers) both his outward and his inward doctrine, and that he was of no side at the bottom. When I am there, I forget I ever was of any party myself; nay, I am often so happily absorbed by the abstracted reason of things, that I am ready to imagine there never was any such monster as party. Alas, I am soon awakened from the pleasing dream by the Greek and Roman historians, by Guicciardine, by Machiavel, and Thuanus; for I have vowed to read no history of our own country, till that body of it, which you promise to finish, appears.

I am under no apprehension that a glut of study and retirement should cast me back into the hurry of the world; on the contrary, the single regret which I ever feel, is that I fell so late into this course of life. My philosophy grows confirmed by habit, and if you and I meet again, I will extort this approbation from you: Jam non consilio bonus, sed more eo perauctus, ut non tantum recte facere possim, sed nisi recte facere non possim. The little incivilities I have met with from opposite sets of people, have been so far from rendering me violent or sour to any, that I think myself obliged to them all; some have cured me of my fears, by showing me how impotent the malice of the world is; others have cured me of my hopes, by showing how precarious popular friendships are; all have cured me of surprise. In driving me out of party, they have driven me out of cursed company; and in stripping me of titles and rank and estate, and such trinkets, which

every man that will may spare, they have given me that which no man can be happy without.

Reflection and habit have rendered the world so indifferent to me, that I am neither afflicted nor rejoiced, angry nor pleased, at what happens in it, any farther than personal friendships interest me in the affairs of it, and this principle extends my cares but a little way. Perfect tranquillity is the general tenour of my life : good digestions, serene weather, and some other mechanic springs, wind me above it now and then, but I never fall below it; I am sometimes gay, but I am never sad. I have gained new friends, and have lost some old ones; my acquisitions of this kind give me a good deal of pleasure, because they have not been made lightly. I know no vows so solemn as those of friendship, and therefore a pretty long noviciate of acquaintance should methinks precede them: my losses of this kind give me but little trouble; I contributed nothing to them; and a friend who breaks with me unjustly, is not worth preserving. As soon as I leave this town (which will be in a few days), I shall fall back into that course of life, which keeps knaves and fools at a great distance from me: I have an aversion to them both, but in the ordinary course of life I think I can bear the sensible knave better than the fool. One must indeed with the former be in some or other of the attitudes of those wooden men whom I have seen before a sword-cutler's shop in Germany; but even in these constrained postures the witty rascal will divert me; and he that diverts me does me a great deal of good, and lays me under an obligation to him, which I am not obliged to pay him in another coin. The fool obliges me to be almost as much upon my guard as the knave, and he makes me no amends; he numbs me like the torpor, or he teazes me like the fly. This is the picture of an old friend,