Thus we proceed apace in converting each other from all manner of infidelity. Ajax and Hector are no more to be compared to Corinæus and Arthur, than the Guelphs and Ghibellines are to the Mohocks of ever-dreadful memory. This amazing writer has made me lay aside Homer for a week, and when I take him up again, I shall be very well prepared to translate, with belief and reverence, the speech of Achilles's horse. You will excuse all this trifling, or any thing else which prevents a sheet full of compliment: And believe there is nothing more true (even more true than any thing in Jeffery is false) than that I have a constant affection for you, and am, etc. P.S. I know you will take part in rejoicing for the victory of Prince Eugene over the Turks, in the zeal you bear to the Christian interest, though your cousin of Oxford (with whom I dined yesterday) says, there is no other difference in the Christians beating the Turks, or the Turks beating the Christians, than whether the Emperor shall first declare war against Spain, or Spain declare it against the Emperor. LETTER X. Nov. 27, 1717. THE question you proposed to me is what at present I am the most unfit man in the world to answer, by my loss of one of the best of fathers. He had lived in such a course of temperance as was enough to make the longest life agreeable to him, and in such a course of piety as sufficed to make the most sudden death so also. Sudden indeed it was: However, I heartily beg of God to give me such a one, provided I can lead such a life. I leave him to the mercy of God, and to the piety of a religion that extends beyond the grave: Si qua est ea cura, etc. He has left me to the ticklish management of so narrow a fortune, that any one false step would be fatal. My mother is in that dispirited state of resig. nation, which is the effect of long life, and the loss of what is dear to us. We are really each of us in want of a friend, of such an humane turn as yourself, to make almost any thing desirable to us. I feel your absence more than ever, at the same time I can less express my regards to you than ever; and shall make this, which is the most sincere letter I ever writ to you, the shortest and faintest perhaps of any you have received. It is enough if you reflect, that barely to remember any person when one's mind is taken up with a sensible sorrow, is a great degree of friendship. I can say no more but that I love you, and all that are yours; and that I wish it may be very long before any of yours shall feel for you what I now feel for my father. Adieu. LETTER XI. Rentcomb, in Gloucestershire, Oct. 3, 1721. YOUR kind letter has overtaken me here, for I have been in and about this country ever since your departure. I am well pleased to date this from a place so well known to Mrs. Blount, where I write as if I were dictated to by her ancestors, whose faces are all upon me. I fear none so much as Sir Christopher Guise, who, being in his shirt, seems as ready to combat me, as her own Sir John was to demolish Duke Lancastere. I dare say your Lady will recollect his figure. I looked upon the mansion, walls, and terraces; the plantations, and slopes, which nature has made to command a variety of valleys and rising woods; with a veneration mixed with a pleasure, that represented her to me in those puerile amusements, which engaged her so many years ago in this place. I fancied I saw her sober over a sampler, or gay over a jointed baby. I dare say she did one thing more, even in those early times; "remem"bered her Creator in the days of her youth." You describe so well your hermitical state of life, that none of the ancient anchorites could go beyond you, for a cave in a rock, with a fine spring, or any of the accommodations that befit a solitary. Only I don't remember to have read, that any of those venerable and holy personages took with them a lady, and begat sons and daughters. You must modestly be content to be accounted a patriarch. But were you a little younger, I should rather rank you with Sir Amadis, and his fellows. If piety be so romantic, I shall turn hermit in good earnest; for, I see, one may go so far as to be poetical, and hope to save one's soul at the same time. I really wish myself something more, that is, a prophet; for I wish I were, as Habakkuk, to be taken by the hair of his head, and visit Daniel in his den. You are very obliging in saying, I have now a whole family upon my hands to whom to discharge the part of a friend; I assure you, I like them all so well, that I will never quit my hereditary right to them; you have made me yours, and con sequently them mine. I still see them walking on my green at Twickenham, and gratefully remember, not only their green gowns, but the instructions they gave me how to slide down and trip up the steepest slopes of my mount. Pray think of me sometimes, as I shall often of you, and know me for what I am, that is, Your, etc. LETTER XII. Oct. 21, 1712. YOUR very kind and obliging manner of enquir ing after me, among the first concerns of life, at your resuscitation, should have been sooner answered and acknowledged. I sincerely rejoice at your recovery from an illness which gave me less pain than it did you, only from my ignorance of it. I should have else been seriously and deeply afflicted, in the thought of your danger by a fever. I think it a fine and a natural thought, which I lately read in a letter of Montaigne's, published by P. Coste, giving an account of the last words of an intimate friend of his : "Adieu, my friend! the pain I feel will soon be 66 over; but I grieve for that you are to feel, which "is to last you for life." I join with your family in giving God thanks for lending us a worthy man somewhat longer. The comforts you receive from their attendance, put me in mind of what old Fletcher of Saltoune said one day to me. "Alas, I have nothing to do but to die; "I am a poor individual; no creature to wish, or to "fear, for my life or death: 'Tis the only reason "I have to repent being a single man ; now I grow "old, I am like a tree without a prop, and without young trees to grow round me, for company and "defence." 86 I hope the gout will soon go after the fever, and all evil things remove far from you. • But pray tell me, when will you move towards us? If you had an interval to get hither, I care not what fixes you afterwards except the gout. Pray come and never stir from us again. Do away your dirty acres, cast them to dirty people, such as in the scripture-phrase possess the land. Shake off your earth like the noble animal in Milton: The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, he springs as broke from honds, Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks. But, I believe, Milton never thought these fine verses of his should be applied to a man selling a parcel of dirty acres; though in the main, I think, it may haye some resemblance. For, God knows! this little space of ground nourishes, buries, and confines us, as that of Eden did these creatures, till we can shake it loose, at least in our affections and desires. Believe, dear Sir, I truly love and value you: Let Mrs. Blount know that she is in the list of my Memento, Domine, famulorum famularumque's, etc. My poor mother is far from well, declining; and I am watching over her, as we watch an expiring taper, that, even when it looks brightest, wastes fastest. I am (as you will see from the whole air of this letter) not in the gayest nor easiest humour, but always with sincerity, Your, etc. LETTER XIII. June 27, 1723. YOU may truly do me the justice to think no man is more your sincere well-wisher than myself, or more the sincere well-wisher of your whole family; with all which, I cannot deny but I have a mixture of envy to you all, for loving one another so well; and for enjoying the sweets of that life, which can only be tasted by people of good-will. They from all shades the darkness can exclude, |