LETTERS

TO AND FROM

Dr. JONATHAN SWIFT, etc.

From the Year 1714 to 1737.

W

LETTER I.

Mr. POPE to Dr. SWIFT.

June 18, 1714.

HATEVER Apologies it might become me to make at any other time for writing to you, I shall use none now, to a man who has own'd himself as fplenetic as a Cat in the Country. In that circumstance, I know by experience a letter is a very useful, as well as amusing thing: If you are too bufied in State affairs to read it, yet you may find entertaiment in folding it into divers figures, either doubling it into a pyramidical, or twifting it into a serpentine form:

or, if your difpofition should not be fo mathematical, in taking it with you to that place where men of studious minds are apt to fit longer than ordinary; where, after an abrupt divifion of the paper, it may not be unpleasant to try to fit and rejoin the broken lines together. All these amusements I am no stranger to in the Country, and doubt not but (by this time) you begin to relish them, in your present contemplative situation,

I remember a man, who was thought to have some knowledge in the world, used to affirm, that no people in town ever complained they were forgotten by their Friends in the country: but my encreasing experience convinces me he was mistaken, for I find a great many here grievously complaining of you, upon this score. I am told further, that you treat the few you correspond with in a very arrogant style, and tell them you admire at their infolence in disturbing your meditations, or even enquiring of your retreat: but this I will not positively affert, because I never received any fuch insulting Epistle from you. My Lord Oxford says you have not written

a

Some time before the | reconcile them, he retired Death of Queen Anne, when to a Friend's House in Berk-. her minifters were quarrel-shire, and never faw them ling, and the Dean could not | after. S.

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to him once fince you went: but this perhaps may be only policy, in him or you: and I, who am half a Whig, must not entirely credit any thing he affirms. At Button's it is reported you are gone to Hanover, and that Gay goes only on an Embassy to you. Others apprehend fome dangerous State treatise from your retirement; and a Wit, who affects to imitate Balfac, fays, that the Ministry now are like those Heathens of old, who received their Oracles from the Woods. The Gentlemen of the Roman Catholic perfuafion are not unwilling to credit me, when I whisper, that you are gone to meet some Jesuits commiffioned from the Court of Rome, in order to fettle the most convenient methods to be taken for the coming of the Pretender. Dr. Arbuthnot is fingular in his opinion, and imagines your only design is to attend at full leifure to the life and adventures of Scriblerus b. This indeed must be granted of greater importance than all the reft;

This project (in which | life and writings of Scriblerus; of which only fome detached parts and fragments were done, fuch as the Memoirs of Scriblerus, the Travels of Gulliver, the Treatise of the Profund, the literal Criticisms on Virgil, &c.

the principal perfons engaged were Dr. Arbuthnot, Dr. Swift, and Mr. Pope) was a very noble one. It was to write a complete satire in prose upon the abuses in every branch of fcience, comprised in the hiftory of the