Madam,

TO THE DUCHESS.

My beginning thus low is meant as a mark of respect, like receiving your Grace at the bottom of the stairs. I am glad you know your duty; for it hath been a known and established rule above twenty years in England, that the first advances have been constantly made me by all ladies who aspired to my acquaintance, and the greater their quality, the greater were their advances. Yet, I know not by what weakness, I have condescended graciously to dispense with you upon this important article. Though Mr. Gay will tell you that a nameless person sent me eleven messages* before I would yield to a visit: I mean a person to whom he is infinitely obliged, for being the occasion of the happiness he now enjoys under the protection and favour of my Lord Duke and your Grace. At the same time, I cannot forbear telling you, Madam, that you are a little imperious in your manner of making your advances. You say, perhaps you shall not like me; I affirm you are mistaken, which I can plainly demonstrate; for I have certain intelligence, that another person dislikes me of late, with whose likings yours have not for some time past gone together. However, if I shall once have the honour to attend your Grace, I will out of fear and prudence appear as vain as I can, that I may not know your thoughts of me.

* He means Queen Caroline; and her neglect of Gay, which recommended him to the Duchess of Queensberry. Warton.

This is your own direction, but it was needless. For Diogenes himself would be vain, to have received the honour of being one moment of his life in the thoughts of your Grace.

LETTER CV.

LORD BOLINGBROKE TO DR. SWIFT.

Jan. 17, 1730-31.

I BEGIN my letter by telling you that my wife has been returned from abroad about a month, and that her health, though feeble and precarious, is better than it has been these two years. She is much your servant, and as she has been her own physician with some success, imagines she could be yours with the same.

Would to God you was within her reach! She would, I believe, prescribe a great deal of the medicina animi, without having recourse to the books of Trismegistus. Pope and I should be her principal apothecaries in the course of the cure; and though our best botanists complain, that few of the herbs and simples which go to the composition of these remedies, are to be found at present in our soil, yet there are more of them here than in Ireland; besides, by the help of a little chemistry, the most noxious juices may become salubrious, and rank poison a specific. Pope is now in my library with me, and writes to the world, to the present and to future ages, whilst I begin this

letter which he is to finish to you. What good he will do to mankind I know not; this comfort he may be sure of, he cannot do less than you have done before him.* I have sometimes thought, that if preachers, hangmen, and moral-writers keep vice at a stand, or so much as retard the progress of it, they do as much as human nature admits: a real reformation is not to be brought about by ordinary means; it requires those extraordinary means which become punishments as well as lessons: national corruption must be purged by national calamities. Let us hear from you. We deserve this attention, because we desire it, and be cause we believe that you desire to hear from us.

LETTER CVI.

LORD BOLINGBROKE AND MR. POPE TO DR. SWIFT.

March 29, (1731).

HAVE delayed several posts answering your letter of January last, in hopes of being able to

*This is a strange assertion to be made to Swift, who prided himself on his labours to improve mankind by the severity of his discipline; but perhaps Lord Bolingbroke meant to refer to Swift's inefficient attempts to reconcile the ministers shortly prior to the death of Queen Anne.

+ Bolingbroke has enlarged on this topic in his philosophical works, intending to depreciate Christianity, by shewing that it has not had a general effect on the morals of mankind, nor produced a real reformation: an argument nothing to the purpose, nor any impeachment of the doctrines of the Gospel; even if it were well founded, as it certainly is not. Warton.

a

speak to you about a project which concerns us both, but me the most, since the success of it would bring us together. It has been a good while in my head, and at my heart; if it can be set a going, you shall hear more of it. I was ill in the beginning of the winter for near a week, but in no danger either from the nature of my distemper, or from the attendance of three physicians. Since that bilious intermitting fever, I have had, as I had before, better health than the regard I have paid to health deserves. We are both in the decline of life, my dear Dean, and have been some years going down the hill; let us make the passage as smooth as we can. Let us fence against physical evil by care, and the use of those means which experience must have pointed out to us: let us fence against moral evil by philosophy. I renounce the alternative you propose. But we may, nay, (if we will follow nature, and do not work up imagination against her plainest dictates,) we shall of course grow every year more indifferent to life, and to the affairs and interests of a system out of which we are soon to go. This is much better than stupidity. The decay of passion strengthens philosophy, for and stupidity not succeed. Passions (says Pope, our divine,* as you will see one time or other) are the Gales of life, let us not complain that they do

passion may decay,

* Pope took the image from Lord Bacon:- "The mind would be temperate and stayed, if the affections, as winds, did not put it into tumult," &c. Bowles.

not blow a storm. What hurt does age do us, in subduing what we toil to subdue all our lives? It is now six in the morning: I recal the time (and am glad it is over) when about this hour I used to be going to bed, surfeited with pleasure, or jaded with business my head often full of schemes, and my heart as often full of anxiety. Is it a misfortune, think you, that I rise at this hour refreshed, serene, and calm? that the past, and even the present affairs of life stand like objects at a distance from me, where I can keep off the disagreeable so as not to be strongly affected by them, and from whence I can draw the others nearer to me? Passions, in their force, would bring all these, nay, even future contingencies, about my ears at once, and reason would but ill defend me in the scuffle.

I leave Pope to speak for himself, but I must tell you how much my wife is obliged to you. She says she would find strength enough to nurse you, if you was here, and yet, God knows, she is extremely weak the slow fever works under, and mines the constitution; we keep it off sometimes, but still it returns, and makes new breaches before nature can repair the old ones. I am not ashamed to say to you, that I admire her more* every hour

* She was niece to Madame de Maintenon, educated at St. Cyr, and was a woman of a very beautiful person, and very agreeable manners. Her letters are written in very elegant French. She was a woman of much observation. Madame de Maintenon mentions her in her letters. Dr. Trapp told me that Lord Bolingbroke, boasting one day of his former gallantries, she said to him, smiling, "When I look at you, methinks I see the ruins of a fine old Roman aqueduct; but the water has ceased to flow." Warton.