favourer of it, and allows you to do your best to serve an old tory, and a sufferer for the church of England, though you are a whig, as I am.
We have here some verses in your name, which I am angry at. Sure you would not use me so ill as to flatter me? I therefore think it is some other weak Irishman.
P. S. I did not take the pen out of Pope's hands, I protest to you. But since he will not fill the remainder of the page, I think I may without offence. I seek no epistolary fame, but am a good deal pleased to think that it will be known hereafter that you and I lived in the most friendly intimacy together. Pliny writ his letters for the publick[1], so did Seneca, so did Balsac, Voiture, &c. Tully did not, and therefore these give us more pleasure than any which have come down to us from antiquity. When we read them, we pry into a secret which was intended to be kept from us. That is a pleasure. We see Cato, and Brutus, and Pompey and others, such as they really were, and not such as the gaping multitude of their own age took them to be, or as historians and poets have represented them to ours. That is another pleasure. I remember to have seen a procession at Aix la Chapelle, wherein an image of Charlemagne is carried on the shoulders of a man, who is hid by the long robe of the imperial saint. Follow him into the vestry, you see the bearer slip from under the robe, and the gigantick
- ↑ A just and sensible criticism on epistolary wriiings, which we should bear in our minds whilst we are reading this collection of letters.
figure
