opinion of any honest man or good subject, as the intervening, officious, impertinence of those goers between us, who in England pretend to intimacies with you, and in Ireland to intimacies with me. I cannot but receive any that call upon me in your name, and in truth they take it in vain too often. I take all opportunities of justifying you against these friends, especially those who know all you think and write, and repeat your slighter verses. It is generally on such little scraps that witlings feed; and it is hard the world should judge of our housekeeping from what we fling out to the dogs, yet this is often the consequence. But they treat you still worse, mix their own with yours, print them to get money, and lay them at your door. This I am satisfied was the case in the Epistle to a Lady; it was just the same hand (if I have any judgment in style) which printed your Life and Character before, which you so strongly disavowed in your letters to lord Carteret, myself, and others. I was very well informed of another fact which convinced me yet more; the same person who gave this to be printed, offered to a bookseller a piece in prose of yours, as commissioned by you, which has since appeared and been owned to be his own. I think (I say once more) that I know your hand, though you did not mine in the Essay on Man. I beg your pardon for not telling you, as I should, had you been in England: but no secret can cross your Irish Sea, and every clerk in the postoffice had known it. I fancy, though you lost sight of me in the first of those essays, you saw me in the second. The design of concealing myself was good, and had its full effect: I was thought a divine, a philosopher, and what not? and my doctrine
