wine I should require half a pint a day, and as much at night and you were growing as bad, unless your Duke and Duchess have mended you. Your colic is owing to intemperance of the philosophical kind; you eat without care, and if you drink less than I, you drink too little. But your inattention I cannot pardon, because I imagined the cause was removed, for I thought it lay in your forty millions of schemes by court-hopes and court-fears. Yet Mr. Pope has the same defect, and it is of all others the most mortal to conversation; neither is my Lord Bolingbroke untinged with it: all for want of my rule, Vive la bagatelle! but the Doctor is the king of inattention. What a vexatious life should I lead among you? If the Duchess be a reveuse, I will never come to Amesbury; or, if I do, I will run away from you both, to one of her women, and the steward and chaplain.

Madam,

I mentioned something to Mr. Gay of a Tunbridge-acquaintance, whom we forget of course when we turn to town, and yet I am assured that if they meet again next summer, they have a better title to resume their commerce. Thus I look on my right of corresponding with your Grace to be better established upon your return to Amesbury ; and I shall at this time descend to forget, or at least suspend my resentments of your neglect all the time you were in London. I still keep in my

heart, that Mr. Gay had no sooner turned his back, than you left the place in this letter void which he had commanded you to fill: though your guilt confounded you so far, that you wanted presence of mind to blot out the last line, where that command stared you in the face. But it is my misfortune to quarrel with all my acquaintance, and always come by the worst; and fortune is ever against me, but never so much as by pursuing me out of mere partiality to your Grace, for which you are to answer. By your connivance, she hath pleased, by one stumble on the stairs, to give me a lameness that six months hath not been able perfectly to cure and thus I am prevented from revenging myself by continuing a month at Amesbury, and breeding confusion in your Grace's family. No disappointment through my whole life hath been so vexatious by many degrees; and God knows whether I shall ever live to see the invincible lady to whom I was obliged for so many favours, and whom I never beheld since she was a brat in hanging-sleeves. I am, and shall be ever, with the greatest respect and gratitude, Madam, your Grace's most obedient, and most humble, &c.

LETTER CXXI..

LORD BOLINGBROKE TO DR. SWIFT.

July 18, 1732.,,

I WRITE this letter, in hopes that Pope, a man scattered in the world (according to the French phrase) will soon procure me an opportunity of conveying it safely to you, my reverend Dean. For my own part, half this wicked nation might go to you, or half your beggarly nation might come to us, and the whole migration be over before I knew any thing of the matter. My letter will concern neither affairs of state nor of party; and yet I would not have it fall into the hands of our ministers it might pass in their excellent noddles for a piece of a plot against themselves, if not against the state; or, at least, it might furnish them with an opportunity of doing an ill-natured, and disappointing a good-natured thing; which being a pleasure to the malicious and the base, I should be sorry to give it on any occasion, and especially on this, to the par nobile fratrum.* ·

After this preamble, I proceed to tell you, that there is in my neighbourhood, in Berkshire, a clergyman, one Mr. Talbot, related to the solicitor-general, and protected by him. This man has now the living of Burfield,† which the late Bishop of

* Sir Robert Walpole, and his brother Horace.-B. A rectory in Berkshire.-B.

Durham held before, and, for aught I know, after he was Bishop of Oxford.* The living is worth four hundred pounds per annum, over and above a curate paid, as Mr. Corry, a gentleman who does my business in that country, and who is a very grave authority, assures me. The parsonage house is extremely good, the place pleasant, and the air excellent, the distance from London a little day's journey, and from hence (give me leave to think the circumstance of some importance to you) not much above half a day's even for you who are no great jockey. Mr. Talbot has many reasons which make him desirous to settle in Ireland for the rest of his life, and has been looking out for a change of preferment some time. As soon as I heard this, I employed one to know whether he continued in the same mind, and to tell him that an advantageous exchange might be offered him, if he could engage his kinsman to make it practicable at court. He answered for his own acceptance, and his kinsman's endeavours. I employed next some friends to secure my Lord Dorset, who very frankly declared himself ready to serve you in any thing, and in this if you desired it. But he mentioned a thing, at the same time, wholly unknown

* It is honourable to Bolingbroke, that of all the Dean's great and powerful friends, he appeared, while in office, most anxious to fix his fortune; and now, when deprived of power, seems to have been equally assiduous in discovering means of settling him in England. But the exchange proposed in this letter was too unfavourable for Swift to be carried into effect. Sir W. Scott.

to me, which is, that your deanery is not in the nomination of the crown, but in the election of the chapter. This may render our affair perhaps more easy; more hard, I think, it cannot be; but in all cases, it requires other measures to be taken. One of these I believe must be, to prepare Hoadley, Bishop of Salisbury, if that be possible, to prepare his brother the Archbishop of Dublin. The light in which the proposition must be represented to him and our ministers, (if it be made to them) is this; that though they gratify you, they gratify you in a thing advantageous to themselves, and silly in you to ask. I suppose it will not be hard to persuade them, that it is better for them you should be a private parish priest in an English county, than a dean in the metropolis of Ireland, where they know, because they have felt, your authority and influence. At least, this topic is a plausible one for those who speak to them, to insist upon, and coming out of a whig mouth may have weight. Sure I am, they will be easily persuaded, that quitting power for ease, and a greater for a less revenue, is a foolish bargain, which they should by consequence help you to make.

You see now the state of this whole affair, and you will judge better than I am able to do, of the means to be employed on your side of the water : as to those on this, nothing shall be neglected. Find some secure way of conveying your thoughts and your commands to me; for my friend has a right to command me arbitrarily, which no man