you took to see him. The Dean is well; I have had many accounts of him from Irish evidence, but only two letters these four months, in both which you are mentioned kindly: he is in the north of Ireland, doing I know not what, with I know not whom. Mr. Cleland always speaks of you: he is at Tunbridge, wondering at the superior carnivoracity of our friend he plays now with the old Dutchess, nay dínes with her, after she has won all his money. Other news I know not, but that Counsellor Bickford has hurt himself, and has the strongest walking-staff I ever saw. He intends speedily to make you a visit with it at Amesbury. I am my Lord Duke's, my Lady Dutchess's, Mr. Dormer's, General Dormer's, and Your, etc. LETTER XIX. 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 can't 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 Wr; 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 Dutchess 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 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 you did not. Believe me Your, etc. LETTER XX. October 1, 1730. DEAR SIR, 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 anybody will take a farthing candle for a better guide, and more serviceable companion. 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 don't say this with any allusion to my poetical capacity as a son of Apollo, but in my companionable one (if you'll 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 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, etc. 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, etc. LETTER XXI. 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 encreases; 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, etc. 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 |