LETTER VII. FROM THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER. March 26, 1721. You ou are not yourself gladder you are well than I am; especially since I can please myself with the thought, that when you had lost your health elsewhere, you recovered it here. May these lodgings never treat you worse, nor you at any time have less reason to be fond of them! I thank you for the sight of your Verses,* and with the freedom of an honest, though perhaps injudicious friend, must tell you, that though I could like some of them, if they were any body's else but yours, yet as they are yours, and to be owned as such, I can scarce like any of them. Not but that the four first lines are good, especially the second couplet; and might, if followed by four others as good, give reputation to a writer of a less established fame: but from you I expect something of a more perfect kind, and which the oftener it is read, the more it will be admired. When you barely exceed other writers, you fall much beneath yourself: it is your misfortune now to write without a rival, and to be tempted by that means to be more careless, than you would otherwise be in your composures. Thus much I could not forbear saying, though I * Epitaph on Mr. Harcourt. Pope. have a motion of consequence in the House of Lords to-day, and must prepare for it. I am even with you for your ill paper; for I write upon worse, having no other at hand. I wish you the continuance of your health most heartily; and am Your, &c. ever I have sent Dr. Arbuthnot the Latin MS.† which I could not find when you left me; and I am so angry at the writer for his design, and his manner of executing it, that I could hardly forbear sending him a line of Virgil along with it. The chief reasoner of that philosophic farce is a Gallo-Ligur, as he is called-what that means in English or French, I cannot say-but all he says is in so loose and slippery and trickish a way of reasoning, that I could not forbear applying the passage of Virgil to him: * The appeal respecting the Dormitory, of which Mr. Nichols gives some account in his Notes on "Atterbury's Epistolary Correspondence;" a work to which I owe a few other illustrations of these Letters. C. Bowles. Written by Huetius, Bishop of Avranches. He was a mean reasoner; as may be seen by a vast collection of fanciful and extravagant conjectures, which he called a Demonstration; mixed up with much reading, which his friends called learning; and delivered (by the allowance of all) in good Latin. This not being received for what he would give it, he composed a treatise Of the Weakness of the Human Understanding: a poor system of scepticism; indeed little other than an abstract of Sextus Empiricus. Warburton. A much more useful undertaking was his directing and superintending the Dauphin edition of the Classics. The commentary on his own life is entertaining. Warton. Vane Ligur, frustraque animis elate superbis, To be serious, I hate to see a book gravely written, and in all the forms of argumentation, which proves nothing, and which says nothing; and endeavours only to put us into a way of distrusting our own faculties, and doubting whether the marks of truth and falsehood can in any case be distinguished from each other. Could that blessed point be made out, (as it is a contradiction in terms to say it can,) we should then be in the most uncomfortable and wretched state in the world; and I would in that case be glad to exchange my reason with a dog for his instinct, to-morrow. LETTER VIII. L. CHANCELLOR HARCOURT TO MR. POPE. December 6, 1722, I CANNOT but suspect myself of being very unreasonable in begging you once more to review the inclosed. Your friendship draws this trouble on you. I may freely own to you, that my tenderness makes me exceeding hard to be satisfied with any thing which can be said on such an unhappy subject. I caused the Latin epitaph to be as often altered before I could approve it. When once your epitaph is set up, there can be no alteration of it; it will remain a perpetual mo nument of your friendship, and, I assure myself, you will so settle it, that it shall be worthy of you. I doubt whether the word, denied, in the third line, will justly admit of that construction which it ought to bear, viz. renounced, deserted, &c. denied is capable, in my opinion, of having an ill sense put upon it, as too great uneasiness, or more good-nature, than a wise man ought to have. I very well remember you told me, you could scarce mend those two lines, and therefore I can scarce expect your forgiveness for my desiring you to reconsider them. Harcourt stands dumb, and Pope is forc'd to speak. I cannot perfectly, at least without farther discoursing you, reconcile myself to the first part of that line; and the word forc'd (which was my own, and, I persuade myself, for that reason only submitted to by you) seems to carry too doubtful a construction for an epitaph, which, as I apprehend, ought as easily to be understood as read. I shall acknowledge it as a very particular favour, if at your best leisure you will peruse the inclosed and vary it, if you think it capable of being amended, and let me see you any morning next week. LETTER IX. FROM THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER. September 21, 1721. I AM now confined to my bed-chamber, and to the matted room wherein I am writing, seldom venturing to be carried down even into the parlour to dinner, unless when company to whom I cannot excuse myself comes, which I am not ill pleased to find is now very seldom. This is my case in the sunny part of the year: what must I expect, when inversum contristat Aquarius annum? "if these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" Excuse me for employing a sentence of scripture on this occasion; I apply it very seriously. One thing relieves me a little under the ill prospect I have of spending my time at the Deanery this winter; that I shall have the opportunity of seeing you oftener; though, I am afraid, you will have little pleasure in seeing me there. So much for my ill state of health, which I had not touched on, had not your friendly letter been so full of it. One civil thing, which you say in it, made me think you had been reading Mr. Waller ;* and possessed of that image at the end of his copy, à la malade, had you not bestowed it on one who has no right to the least * Whom the bishop so happily imitated in his lines on Flavia's Fan. Warton. |