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dinner, if I understood him rightly, and perhaps stay all night. As to lodgings, I care not where I lodge so it be under Heav'ns and your protection. P.S.-I have sent your servant to Thistleworth, in case my Lord Ch. be returned from Essex, for an answer to your question.

18.

POPE TO THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH.

[1743.]

YOUR Grace may believe me that my uncertainty is what I cannot help, and that I wisht firmly to have been sooner with you. But I have had some concerns of Mr. Warburton to. manage in town, and others of my own absolutely needful before my journey; and I am so infirm (as you but see toowell) that I can't do business or pass from place to place so easily as others. I have put off my journey as late as possible so that I will yet have some days with your Grace. I am almost sorry you are so kind to me. I can be so little useful or agreeable from one unlucky circumstance or other, and so imperfectly show you my sense of what you do for me, that I am ashamed to be what I cannot help, the thing that God made me. If you send on Friday, so as we may come in the afternoon the same day, I will not fail, nor will Mrs. B., I'me sure, if possible, for she is perfectly sensible of the distinction you honour her with.

19.

POPE TO THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH.

[1743 or 1744.]

YOUR Grace might almost think I told you the thing which was not, and which the very horses in Gulliver's travels disdain to do. But the truth is, the day after I sent to your Grace when Lord Marchmont was with you, I was taken so ill of my asthma that I went to Chelsea to let blood by my friend Cheselden, by which I had found more good than by any other practise in four months. But at my return to town I was

422

LETTERS TO DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH. [LETT. 19.

worse and worse for the two or three days I stayd there, and still unable to venture out to you even so little a way as from Lord Orrery's. I was unwilling to inform you how bad I was, and am unwilling to inform you how bad I am still, tho' I've again let blood and taken a hundred medicines. I am become the whole business now of my two servants, and have rot, and yet can not stir from my bed and fireside. All this I meant to have hid from you by my little note yesterday. For I really think you feel too much concern for those you think your friends, and I would rather die quietly, and slink out of the world, than give any good heart much trouble for me living or dead. The first two or three days that I feel any life return I will pass a part of it at your bedside. In the meantime I beg God to make our condition supportable to us both.

APPENDIX III.

A LETTER

TO

A NOBLE LORD.'

ON OCCASION OF SOME LIBELS WRITTEN AND PROPAGATED AT COURT IN THE YEAR 1732-3.

Nov. 30, 1733.

MY LORD,-Your Lordship's Epistle' has been published some days, but I had not the pleasure and pain of seeing it till yesterday: pain, to think your Lordship should attack me at all; pleasure, to find that you can attack me so weakly. As I want not the humility, to think myself in every way but one your inferior, it seems but reasonable that I should take the only method either of self-defence or retaliation, that is left me against a person of your quality and power. And as by your choice of this weapon, your pen, you generously (and

1 This letter, which was first printed in the year 1733, bears the same place in our author's prose that the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot' does in his poetry. They are both apologetical, repelling the libellous slanders on his reputation with this difference, that the 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,' his friend, was chiefly directed against Grubstreet writers, and this Letter to the Noble Lord, his enemy, against Court scribblers. For the rest, they are both masterpieces in their kinds; that in verse, more grave, moral, and sublime; this in prose, more lively,

critical and pointed; but equally con. ducive to what he had most at heart, the vindication of his moral character, the only thing he thought worth his care in literary altercations, and the first thing he would expect from the good offices of a surviving friend.— WARBURTON.

For the history of this letter, see pp. 262-267 of this Volume.

2 Intitled, 'An Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity from a Nobleman at Hampton Court;' Aug. 28, 1783, and printed the November following for J. Roberts, fol.-WARBURTON.

modestly too, no doubt) meant to put yourself upon a level with me, I will as soon believe that your Lordship would give a wound to a man unarmed, as that you would deny me the use of it in my own defence.

I presume you will allow me to take the same liberty in my answer to so candid, polite, and ingenious a nobleman, which your Lordship took in yours, to so grace, religious, and respectable a clergyman.' As you answered his Latin in English, permit me to answer your verse in prose. And though your Lordship's reasons for not writing in Latin, might be stronger than mine for not writing in verse, yet I may plead two good ones, for this conduct:-the one, that I want the talent of spinning a thousand lines in a day,' (which, I think is as much time as this subject deserves,) and the other, that I take your Lordship's verse to be as much prose as this letter. But no doubt it was your choice, in writing to a friend, to renounce all the pomp of poetry, and give us this excellent model of the familiar.

When I consider the great difference betwixt the rank your Lordship holds in the world, and the rank which your writings are like to hold in the learned world, I presume that distinction of style is but necessary, which you will see observed through this letter. When I speak of you, my Lord, it will be with all the deference due to the inequality which Fortune has made between you and myself: but when I speak of your writings, my Lord, I must, I can, do nothing but trifle.

I should be obliged indeed to lessen this respect, if all the nobility (and especially the elder brothers) are but so many hereditary fools, if the privilege of lords be to want brains,' if noblemen can hardly write or read,' if all their business is but

1 Dr. Sherwin.-WARBURTON.
"And Pope, with justice, of such

lines may say,

His Lordship spins a thousand
in a day.'

Epist. p. 6.-WARBURTON.
"That to good blood by old pre-
scriptive rules,

Gives right hereditary to be
fools."-WARBURTON.

"Nor wonder that my brain no more affords,

But recollect the privilege of

Lords."- WARBURTON. "And when you see me fairly

write my name;

For England's sake wish all could do the same."-WAR

BURTON.

to dress and vote,' and all their employment in court, to tell lies, flatter in public, slander in private, be false to each other, and follow nothing but self-interest. Bless me, my Lord, what an account is this you give of them? and what would have been said of me, had I immolated, in this manner, the whole body of the nobility, at the stall of a well-fed prebendary ?.

Were it the mere excess of your Lordship's wit, that carried you thus triumphantly over all the bounds of decency, I might consider your Lordship on your Pegasus, as a sprightly hunter on a mettled horse; and while you were trampling down all our works, patiently suffer the injury, in pure admiration of the noble sport. But should the case be quite otherwise should your Lordship be only like a boy that is run away with; and run away with by a very foal; really common charity, as well as respect for a noble family, would oblige me to stop your career, and to help you down from this Pegasus.

Surely the little praise of a writer should be a thing below your ambition: you, who were no sooner born, but in the lap of the Graces; no sooner at school, but in the arms of the Muses; no sooner in the world, but you practised all the skill of it; no sooner in the court, but you possessed all the art of it! Unrivalled as you are, in making a figure, and in making a speech, methinks, my Lord, you may well give up the poor talent of turning a distich. And why this fondness for poetry? Prose admits of the two excellences you most admire, diction and fiction; it admits of the talents you chiefly possess, a most fertile invention, and most florid expression; it is with prose, nay the plainest prose, that you best could teach our nobility to vote, which you justly observe, is half at least of their business:' and give me leave to prophesy, it is to your talent in prose, and not in verse, to your speaking, not

"Whilst all our business is, to
dress and vote."

Epist. p. 6.-WARBURTON.
"Courts are only larger families,
The growth of each, few truths,

and many lies:

in private satirize, in

public flatter.

Few to each other, all to one

point true;

Which one I shan't, nor need explain. Adieu."

P. ult.-WARBURTON.

"All their business is, to dress

and vote."-WARBURTON.

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