cheerfully, without complaints or expostulations, or else Cadenus shall know it, and punish you. What is this world without being as easy in it as prudence and fortune can make us? I find it every day more silly and insignificant, and I conform myself to it for my own ease. I am here as deeply employed in other folks plantations and ditches, as if they were my own concern; and think of my absent friends with delight, and hopes of seeing them happy, and of being happy with them. Shall you, who have so much honour and good sense, act otherwise, to make Cad

and yourself miserable? Settle your affairs, and quit this scoundrel island, and things will be as you desire. I can say no more, being called away. Mais soyez assurée que jamais personne au monde n'a été aimée, éstimée, adorée par votre ami que vous. I have drunkno coffee since I left you, nor intend it till I see you' again there is none worth drinking but yours, if myself may be the judge. Adieu.

FROM LORD BOLINGBROKE.

July 28, 1721.

I NEVER was so angry in all my life, as I was with you last week, on the receipt of your letter of the 19th of June. The extreme pleasure it gave me takes away all the excuses, which I had invented for your long neglect I design to return my humble thanks to those men of eminent gratitude and integrity, the weavers and the judges, and earnestly to entreat them, instead of tossing you in the person of your proxy, who had need to have iron ribs to endure all the drub.

bings you will procure him, to toss you in your proper person, the next time you offend, by going about to talk sense or to do good to the rabble. Is it possible, that one of your age and profession should be ignorant,

that this monstrous beast has passions to be moved, but no reason to be appealed to; and that plain truth will influence half a score men at most in a nation, or an age, while mystery will lead millions by the nose?

Dear Jonathan, since you cannot resolve to write as you preach, what publick authority allows, what councils and senates have decided to be orthodox, instead of what private opinion suggests, leave off instructing the citizens of Dublin. Believe me, there is more pleasure, and more merit too, in cultivating friendship, than in taking care of the state. Fools and knaves are generally best fitted for the last; and none but men of sense and virtue are capable of the other. How comes it then to pass, that you, who have sense, though you have wit, and virtue, though you have kept bad company in your time,.should be so surprised that I continue to write to you, and expect to hear from you, after seven years absence?

Anni prædantur euntes, say you; and time will lop off my luxuriant branches: perhaps it will be so. But I have put the pruninghook into a hand, which works hard to leave the other as little to do of that kind as may be. Some superfluous twigs are every day cut; and as they lessen in number, the bough, which bears the golden fruit of friendship, shoots, swells, and spreads.

Our friend told you what he heard, and what was commonly said, when he told you that I had taken the fancy of growing rich. If I could have resolved to think two minutes a day about stocks, to flatter Law* half an hour a week, or to have any obligation to people I neither loved nor valued, certain it is that I might have gained immensely. But not caring to follow the many bright examples of these kinds, which

The projector of the Mississippi scheme in France, which produced the South Sea scheme here; and of whose very in1eresting history a full account may be seen in the History of Leicestershire, vol. iii. p. 487. N.

France furnished, and which England sent us over, I turned the little money I had of my own, without being let into any secret, very negligently and if I have secured enough to content me, it is because I was soon contented. I am sorry to hear you confess, that the love of money has got into your head. Take care, or it will, ere long, sink into your heart, the proper seat of passions. Plato, whom you cite, looked upon riches, and the other advantages of fortune, to be desirable; but he declared, as you have read in Diogenes Laertius; Fa etsi non affluerint, nihilominus tamen beatum fore sapientem. You may think it, perhaps, hard to reconcile his two journies into Sicily with this maxim, especially since he got fourscore talents of the tyrant. But I can assure you, that he went to the elder Dionysius only to buy books, and to the younger only to borrow a piece of ground, and a number of men, women, and children, to try his Utopia. Aristippus was in Sicily at the same time; and there passed some billingsgate between these reverend persons. This philosopher had a much stronger fancy to grow rich than Plato: he flattered, he cracked jests and danced over a stick to get some of the Sicilian gold; but still even he took care, sibi res, non se rebus submittere. And I remember, with great edification, how he reproved one of his catechumens, who blushed, and shrunk back, when his master showed him the way to the bawdy house. Non ingredi turpe est, sed egredi non posse turpe est. The conclusion of all this is; un bonnete homme ought to have cent mille livres de rente, if you please; but a wise man will be happy with the hundredth part. Let us not refuse riches, when they offer themselves; but let us give them no room in our heads or our hearts. Let us enjoy wealth, without suffering it to become necessary to us. And, to finish with one of Seneca's quaint sentences; "Let "us place it so, that fortune may take it without "tearing it from us." The passage you mention does

follow that, which I quoted to you, and the advice is good. Solon thought so; nay, he went farther: and you remember the reason he gave for sitting in the council of Pisistratus, whom he had done his utmost to oppose; and who, by the way, proved a very good prince. But the epistle is not writ by Cicero, as you seem to think. It is, if I mistake not, an epistle of Dolabella to him. Cato, you say, would not be of the sanie mind. Cato is a most venerable name, and Dolabella was but a scoundrel with wit and valour; and yet there is better sense, nay, there is more virtue, in what Dolabella advises, than in the conduct of Cato. I must own my weakness to you. This Cato, so sung by Lucan in every page, and so much better sung by Virgil in half a line, strikes me with no great respect. When I see him painted in all the glorious colours which eloquence furnishes, I call to mind that image of him, which Tully gives in one of his letters to Atticus, or to somebody else; where he says, that having a mind to keep a debate from coming on in the senate, they made Cato rise to speak, and that he talked till the hour of proposing matters was over. Tully insinuates, that they often made this use of him: Does not the moving picture shift? Do you not behold Clarke of Taunton Dean, in the gown of a Roman senator, sending out the members to piss? The censor used sharp medicines; but, in his time, the patient had strength to bear them. The second Cato inherited this receipt without his skill; and like a true quack, he gave the remedy, because it was his only one, though it was too late. He hastened the patient's death: he not only hastened it, he made it more convulsive and painful.

The condition of your wretched country is worse than you represent it to be. The healthful Indian follows his master, who died of sickness, to the grave; but I much doubt, whether those charitable legislators exact the same, when the master is a lunatick, and

cuts his own throat. I mourn over Ireland with all my heart, but I pity you more. In reading your letter, I feel your pulse; and I judge of your distemper as surely by the figures into which you cast your ink, as the learned doctor at The hand and urinal"* could do, if he pored over your water. You are really in a very bad way. You say your memory declines: I believe it does, since you forget your friends, and since repeated importunity can hardly draw a token of remembrance from you. There are bad airs for the mind, as well as the body: and what do you imagine, that Plato, since you have set me upon quoting him (who thanked Heaven, that he was not a Baotian) would have said of the ultima Thule? Shake off your laziness, ramble over hither, and spend some months in a kinder climate. You will be in danger of meeting but one plague here, and you will leave many behind you. Here you will come among people, who lead a life singular enough to hit your humour; so near the world, as to have all its conveniencies; so far from the world, as to be strangers to all its inconveniencies; wanting nothing which goes to the ease and happiness of life; embarrassed by nothing which is cumbersome. I dare almost venture to say, that you will like us better than the persons you live with, and that we shall be able to make you retrograde (that I may use a canonical simile) as the sun did on the dial of Hezekiah, and begin anew the twelve years which you complain are gone. We will restore to you the nigros angusto fronte capillos; and with them, the dulce loqui, the ridere decorum, et inter vina fugam Cynara mærere proterva. Hæc est vita solutorum miserâ ambitione gravique, and not yours.

I was going to finish with my sheet of paper; but having bethought myself, that you deserve some more punishment, and calling all my anger against you to my aid, I resolve, since I am this morning in the

The sign of a noted quack in those days. N.