you. 66 I know you can find dinners, but you love twelvepenny coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day. I find a greater longing than ever to come among you; and reason good, when I am teased with dukes and duchesses for a visit, all my demands complied with, and all excuses cut off. You remember, "O happy Don Quixote ! queens held his horse, and duchesses pulled off "his armour," or something to that purpose. He was a mean spirited fellow; I can say ten times more; O happy, &c. such a duchess was designed to attend him, and such a duke invited him to command his palace. Nam istos reges ceteros memorare nolo, hominum mendicabula: go read your Plautus, and observe Strobilus vapouring after he had found the pot of gold. I will have nothing to do with that lady: I have long hated her on your account, and the more, because you are so forgiving as not to hate her: however, she has good qualities enough to make her esteemed; but not one grain of feeling. I only wish she were a fool. I have been several months writing near five hundred lines on a pleasant subject, only to tell what my friends and enemies will say on me after I am dead *. I shall finish it soon, for I add two lines every week, and blot out four, and alter eight. I have brought in you and my other friends, as well as enemies and detractors. It is a great comfort to see how corruption and ill conduct are instrumental in uniting virtuous persons and lovers of their country of all denominations: whig and tory, high and low church, as soon as they are left to think freely, * This is found in vol. VIII, and is among the last of his poems all all joining in opinion. If this be disaffection, pray God send me always among the disaffected! and I heartily wish you joy of your scurvy treatment at court, which has given you leisure to cultivate both publick and private virtue; neither of them likely to be soon met within the walls of St. James's or Westminster. But I must here dismiss you, that I may pay my acknowledgments to the duke for the great honour he has done me. MY LORD, I could have sworn that my pride would be always able to preserve me from vanity; of which I have been in great danger to be guilty for some months past, first by the conduct of my lady duchess, and now by that of your grace, which had like to finish the work and I should have certainly gone about showing my letters under the charge of secrecy to every blab of my acquaintance, if I could have the least hope of prevailing on any of them to believe that a man in so obscure a corner, quite thrown out of the present world, and within a few steps of the next, should receive such condescending invitations, from two such persons, to whom he is an utter stranger, and who know no more of him than what they have heard by the partial representations of a friend. But in the mean time, I must desire your grace not to flatter yourself, that I waited for your consent to accept the invitation. I must be ignorant indeed not to know, that the duchess, ever since you met, has been most politickly employed in increasing those forces, and sharpening those arms with which she subdued you at first, and to which, the braver and the wiser you grow, you will more and more submit. submit. Thus I knew myself on the secure side, and it was a mere piece of good manners to insert that clause, of which you have taken the advantage. But as I cannot forbear informing your grace that the duchess's great secret in her art of government, has been to reduce both your wills into one; so I am content, in due observance to the forms of the world, to return my most humble thanks to your grace for so great a favour as you are pleased to offer me, and which nothing but impossibilities shall prevent me from receiving, since I am, with the greatest reason, truth, and respect, my lord, your grace's most obedient, &c. MADAM, I have consulted all the learned in occult sciences of my acquaintance, and have sat up eleven nights to discover the meaning of those two hieroglyphical lines in your grace's hand at the bottom of the last Amesbury letter, but all in vain. Only it is agreed, that the language is Coptick, and a very profound Behmist affures me, the style is poetick, containing an invitation from a very great person of the female sex, to a strange kind of man whom she never saw, and this is all I can find, which after so many former invitations, will ever confirm me in that respect, wherewith I am, madam, your grace's most obedient, &c. VOL. XII. FF FROM FROM THE COUNTESS OF SUFFOLK. SIR, HAMPTON COURT, SEPT. 25, 1731. You seem to think that you have a natural right to abuse me, because I am a woman, and a courtier. I have taken it as a woman and as a courtier ought, with great resentment, and a determined resolution of revenge. The number of letters that have been sent, and thought by many to be yours, (and thank God they were all silly ones) has been a fair field to execute it. Think of my joy to hear you suspected of folly; think of my pleasure when I entered the list for your justification! Indeed I was a little disconcerted to find Mr. Pope took the same side; for I would have had the man of wit, the dignified divine, the Irish drapier, have found no friend but the silly woman and the courtier. Could I have served myself alone in the list, I should not have despaired, that this monitor of princes, this Irish pen, should patriot, this excellent man at speech and have closed the scene under suspicion of having a violent passion for Mrs. Barber; and lady M— or Mrs. Haywood* have writ the progress of it. Now, to my mortification I find every body inclined to think you had no hand in writing those letters; but I every day thank Providence that there is an epitaph in St. Patrick's cathedral, that will be a lasting * Mrs. Haywood, a well known writer of scandal in novels. + On the duke of Schomberg. pre monument monument of your imprudence. I cherish this extremely; for, say what you can to justify it, I am convinced I shall as easily argue the world into the belief of a courtier's sincerity, as you (with all your wit and eloquence) will be able to convince mankind of the prudence of that action. I expect to hear if peace shall ensue, or war continue between us. If I know but little of the art of war, yet you see I do not want courage; and that has made many an ignorant soldier fight successfully. Besides, I have a numerous body of light armed troops to bring into the field, who, when single, may be as inconsiderable as a Lilliputian, yet ten thousand of them embarrassed captain Gulliver. If you send honourable articles, they shall be signed. I insist that you own that you have been unjust to me; for I have never forgot you; for, I have made others send my compliments, because I was not able to write myself. If I cannot justify the advice I gave you, from the success of it, I gave you my reasons for it and it was your business to have judged of my capacity, by the solidity of my arguments. If the principle was false, you ought not to have acted upon it. So you have been only the dupe of your own ill judgment, and not my falsehood. Am I to send back the crown and the plaid, well packed up, in my own character? or am I to follow my own inclination, and continue very truly and very much your humble servant, |