me. I have learned this by living like a hermit, by which I am got backward about nineteen hundred years in the era of the world, and begin to wonder at the wickedness of men. I dine alone upon half a dish of meat, mix water with my wine, walk ten miles a day, and read Baronius. Hic explicit epistola ad dom. Bolingbroke, & incipt ad amicum Pope[1].
Having finished my letter to Aristippus, I now begin to you. I was in great pain about Mrs. Pope, having heard from others that she was in a very dangerous way, which made me think it unseasonable to trouble you. I am ashamed to tell you, that when I was very young I had more desire to be famous than ever since; and fame, like all things else in this life, grows with me every day more a trifle. But you who are so much younger, although you want that health you deserve, yet your spirits are as vigorous as if your body were sounder. I hate a crowd where I have not an easy place to see and be seen. A great library always makes me melancholy[2], where the best author is as much squeezed, and as obscure, as a porter at a coronation. In my own little library, I value the compilements of Grævius and Gronovius, which make thirty-one volumes in folio (and were given me by my lord Bolingbroke) more than all my books besides; because whoever comes into my closet, casts his eyes immediately upon them, and will not vouchsafe to look upon Plato or Xenophon. I tell you it is almost
- ↑ Here ends the epistle to lord Bolingbroke, and begins to my friend Pope.
- ↑ In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, there is an admirable one upon this subject.
incredible
