LETTER IX.

TO THE SAME.

1714.

I RETURNED home as slow and as contemplative after I had parted from you, as my Lord * retired from the Court and glory to his Country-seat and wife, a week ago. I found here a dismal desponding letter from the son of another great courtier who expects the same fate, and who tells me the great ones of the earth will now take it very kindly of the mean ones, if they will favour them with a visit by day-light. With what joy would they lay down all their schemes of glory, did they but know you have the generosity to drink their healths once a day, as soon as they are fallen? Thus the unhappy, by the sole merit of their misfortunes, become the care of Heaven and you. I intended to have put this last into verse, but in this age of ingratitude my best friends forsake me, I mean my rhymes.

I desire Mrs. P―to stay her stomach with these half hundred Plays, till I can procure her a Romance big enough to satisfy her great soul with adventures. As for Novels, I fear she can depend upon none from me but that of my Life, which I am still, as I have been, contriving all possible methods to shorten, for the greater ease both of the historian and the reader. May she believe all the passion and tenderness expressed in these Romances to be but a faint image of what I bear her, and may you (who read nothing) take the same truth upon hearing it from me.

You

will both injure me very much, if you don't think me a truer friend, than ever any romantic lover, or any imitator of their style could be.

adorers.

The days of beauty are as the days of greatness, and so long all the world are your adorers. I am one of those unambitious people, who will love you forty years hence when your eyes begin to twinkle in a retirement, and without the vanity which every one now will take to be thought

Your, etc.

tance.

LETTER X.

THE more I examine my own mind, the more romantic I find myself. Methinks it is a noble spirit of contradiction to Fate and Fortune, not to give up those that are snatched from us; but to follow them the more, the farther they are removed from the sense of it. Sure, Flattery never travelled so far as three thousand miles; it is now only for Truth, which overtakes all things, to reach you at this dis"Tis a generous piece of Popery, that pursues even those who are to be eternally absent, into another world; whether you think it right or wrong, you'll own the very extravagance a sort of piety. I can't be satisfied with strowing flowers over you, and barely honouring you as a thing lost: but must consider you as a glorious, though remote being, and be sending addresses after you. You have carried away so much of me, that what remains is daily languishing and dying over my acquaintance here,

and, I believe, in three or four months more I shall think Aurat Bazar as good a place as Covent Garden. You may imagine this is raillery, but I am really so far gone as to take pleasure in reveries of this kind. Let them say I am romantic, so is every one said to be, that either admires a fine thing or does one. On my conscience, as the world goes, 'tis hardly worth any body's while to do one for the honour of it: Glory, the only pay of generous actions, is now as ill paid as other just debts; and neither Mrs. Macfarland for immolating her lover, nor you, for constancy to your lord, must ever hope to be compared to Lucretia or Portia.

I write this in some anger: for having, since you went, frequented those people most, who seemed most in your favour, I heard nothing that concerned you talked of so often, as that you went away in a black full-bottomed wig; which I did not assert to be a bob, and was answered, Love is blind. I am persuaded your wig had never suffered this criticism, but on the score of your head, and the two eyes that are in it.

Pray, when you write to me, talk of yourself; there is nothing I so much desire to hear of; talk a great deal of yourself; that she who I always thought talked best, may speak upon the best subject. The shrines and reliques you tell me of no way engage my curiosity; I had ten times rather go on pilgrimage to see one such face as yours, than both St. John Baptist's heads. I wish (since you are grown so co

• At Constantinople.

vetous of golden things) you had not only all the fine statues you talk of, but even the golden image which Nebuchadnezzar set up, provided you were to travel no farther than you could carry it.

The court of Vienna is very edifying. The ladies, with respect to their husbands, seem to understand that text literally, that commands to bear one another's burthens: but, I fancy, many a man there is like Issachar, an ass between two burthens. I shall look upon you no more as a Christian, when you pass from that charitable court to the land of jealousy. I expect to hear an exact account how, and at what places, you leave one of the thirty-nine articles after another, as you approach to the lands of infidelity. Pray how far are you got already? Amidst the pomp of a high mass and the ravishing trills of a Sunday opera, what did you think of the doctrine and discipline of the church of England? Had you from your heart a reverence for Sternhold and Hopkins? How did your Christian virtues hold out in so long a voyage?? You have it seems (without passing the bounds of Christendom) out-travelled the sin of fornication: in a little time you'll look upon some others with more patience, than the ladies here are capable of. I reckon, you'll time it so well as to make your religion last to the verge of Christendom, that you may

This letter, in which there is much cold and insipid raillery, and many strokes of idle levity, is written to Lady Wortley Montague, who was then pursuing her journey to Constantinople; whose letters from Turkey, it must be candidly confessed, for the curious information they contain, and for that ease and elegance which constitute the essence and the excellence of the epistolary style, are far superior to the letters of Pope.

discharge your Chaplain (as humanity requires) in a place where he may find some business.

I doubt not but I shall be told (when I come to follow you through those countries) in how pretty a manner you accommodated yourself to the customs of the true Musselmen. They will tell me at what town you practised to sit on the Sopha, at what village you learned to fold a Turbant, where you was bathed and anointed, and where you parted with your black fullbottom. How happy must it be for a gay young woman, to live in a country where it is a part of religious worship to be giddy-headed! I shall hear at Belgrade how the good Bashaw received you with tears of joy, how he was charmed with your agreeable manner of pronouncing the words Allah and Muhamed; and how earnestly you joined with him in exhorting your friend to embrace that religion. But I think his objection was a just one, that it was attended with some circumstances under which he could not properly represent his Britannic Majesty.

Lastly, I shall hear how, the first night you lay at Pera, you had a vision of Mahomet's Paradise; and happily awaked without a soul, from which blessed moment the beautiful body was left at full liberty to perform all the agreeable functions it was made for.

to

I see I have done in this letter as I have often done in your company, talked myself into a good humour, when I begun in an ill one; the pleasure of addressing you makes me run on, and 'tis in your own power to shorten this letter as much as you please, by giving over when you please; so I'll make it no longer by apologies.