yet he was a very impertinent fellow, for saying them in words quite different from those you had yourself employed before on the fame subject: for furely to alter your words is to prejudice them; and I have been told, that a man himself can hardly say the fame thing twice over with equal happiness; Nature is so much a better thing than artifice.

I have written nothing this year: It is no affectation to tell you, my Mother's loss has turned my frame of thinking. The habit of a whole life is a stronger thing than all the reason in the world. I know I ought to be easy, and to be free; but I am dejected, I am confined: my whole amusement is in reviewing my past life, not in laying plans for my future. I wish you cared as little for popular applause as I; as little for any nation, in contradistinction to o thers, as I: and then I fancy, you that are not afraid of the fea, you that are a stronger man at fixty than ever I was at twenty, would come and fee several people who are (at last) like the primitive christians, of one foul and of one mind. The day is come, which I have often wished, but never thought to fee; when every mortal, that I esteem, is of the fame fentiment in Politics and in Religion.

Adieu. All you love, are yours; but all are bufy, except (dear Sir) your fincere friend.

LETTER

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LETTER LXX.

Jan. 6, 1734.

Never think of you and can never write to you, now, without drawing many of those short fighs of which we have formerly talk'd: The reflection both of the friends we have been depriv'd of by Death, and of those from whom we are separated almost as eternally by Absence, checks me to that degree that it takes away in a manner the pleasure (which yet I feel very sensibly too) of thinking I am now converfing with you. You have been filent to me as to your Works; whether those printed here are, or are not genuine? but one, I am fure, is yours; and your method of concealing yourself puts me in mind of the Indian bird I have read of, who hides his head in a hole, while all his feathers and tail stick out. You'll have immediately by several franks (even before 'tis here publish'd) my Epistle to Lord Cobham, part of my Opus Magnum, and the last Essay on Man, both which, I conclude, will be grateful to your bookseller, on whom you please to bestow them so early. There is a woman's war declar'd against me by a certain Lord; his weapons are the fame which women and children

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dren use, a pin to scratch, and a squirt to bespatter: I writ a fort of answer, but was ashamed to enter the lifts with him, and after shewing it to some people, suppress'd it: otherwise it was such as was worthy of him and worthy of me. I was three weeks this autumn with Lord Peterborow, who rejoices in your doings, and al-ways speaks with the greatest affection of you. I need not tell you who else do the same; you may be fure almost all those whom I ever fee, or defire to fee. I wonder not that B---paid you no fort of civility while he was in Ireland: he is too much a half-wit to love a true wit, and too much half-honest, to esteem any entire merit. I hope and think he hates me too, and I will do my best to make him: he is so insupportably infolent in his civility to me when he meets me at one third place, that I must affront him to be rid of it. That strict neutrality as to public parties, which I have constantly observ'd in all my writings, I think gives me the more title to attack such men, as flander and belye my character in private, to those who know me not. Yet even this is a liberty I will never take, unless at the fame time they are Pests of private society, or mischievous members of the public, that is to say, unless they are enemies to all men as well

well as to me.---Pray write to me when you can: If ever I can come to you, I will: if not, may Providence be our friend and our guard thro' this fimple world, where nothing is valuable, but sense and friendship. Adieu, dear Sir, may health attend your years, and then may many years be added to you.

P. S. I am just now told, a very curious Lady intends to write to you to pump you about fome poems said to be yours. Pray tell her, that you have not answered me on the fame questions, and that I shall take it as a thing never to be forgiven from you, if you tell another what you have conceal'd from me.

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LETTER LXXΙ.

Sept. 15, 1734

Have ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew, of all the delicacies of friendship, and yet I fear (from what Lord B. tells me you faid in your last letter) that you did not quite understand the reason of my late filence. I affure you it proceeded wholly from the tender kindness I bear you. When the heart is full, it is angry at all words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all

the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, fince most accounts I have, give me pain for you, and I am unwilling to tell you the condition of my own health. If it were good, I would see you; and yet if I found you in that very condition of deafness, which made you fly from us while we were together, what comfort could we derive from it? In writing often I should find great relief, could we write freely; and yet, when I have done so, you feem by not answering in a very long time, to feel either the same uneafinefs as I do, or to abstain, from fome prudential reafon. Yet I am fure, nothing that you and I wou'd say to each other, (tho' our own fouls were to be laid open to the clerks of the postoffice) could hurt either of us so much, in the opinion of any honeft man or good fubject, as the intervening, officious, impertinence of those Goers between us, who in England pretend to intimacies with you, and in Ireland to intimacies with me. I cannot but receive any that call upon me in your name, and in truth they take it in vain too often. I take all opportunities of justifying you against these Friends, especially