TO LORD BOLINGBROKE.
I RECEIVED your lordship's travelling letter of several dates, at several stages, and from different nations, languages, and religions. Neither could any thing be more obliging than your kind remembrance of me in so many places. As to your ten lustres, I remember, when I complained in a letter to Prior, that I was fifty years old, he was half angry in jest, and answered me out of Terence, ista commemoratio est quasi exprobratio. How then ought I to rattle you, when I have a dozen years more to answer for, all monastically passed in this country of liberty and delight, and money, and good company! I go on answering your letter; it is you were my hero, but the other[1] never was; yet if he were, it was your own fault, who taught me to love him, and often vindicated him, in the beginning of your ministry, from my accusations[2]. But I granted he had the greatest inequalities of any man alive, and his whole scene was fifty times more a what-d'ye-call-it, than yours: for, I declare, yours was unie, and I wish you would so order it, that the world may be as wise as I upon that article. Mr. Pope wishes it too, and I believe there is not a more honest man in England, even without wit. But you regard us not. I was forty-seven years old when I began to think of death[3];
- ↑ Lord Oxford.
- ↑ This is a remarkable sentence; and conveys a depreciating idea of lord Oxford, whom we had imagined Swift preferred to Bolingbroke.
- ↑ The year of queen Anne's death.
