which is all I ask from courtiers, and all a wise man will expect from them. The duchess of Marlborough makes great court to me; but I am too old for her mind and body: yet I cultivate some young people's friendship, because they may be honest men; whereas the old ones experience too often proves not to be so, I having dropped ten where I have taken up one, and I hope to play the better with fewer in my hand. There is a lord Cornbury, a lord Polwarth[1], a Mr. Murray[2], and one or two more, with whom I would never fear to hold out against all the corruption of the world.
You compliment me in vain upon retaining my poetical spirit: I am sinking fast into prose; and, if I ever write more, it ought (at these years and in these times,) to be something, the matter of which will give a value to the work, not merely the manner.
Since my protest (for so I call my dialogue of 1738) I have written but ten lines, which I will send you. They are an insertion for the next new edition of the Dunciad, which generally is reprinted once in two years. In the second canto, among the authors who dive in Fleet ditch, immediately after Arnal, verse 300, add these:
Next plung'd a feeble but a desp'rate pack,
With each a sickly brother at his back;
Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood,
Then numbered with the puppies in the mud.
- ↑ Hugh Hume Campbell, third and last earl of Marchmont. He died January 10, 1794, aged 87. See Gent. Mag. vol. LXIV, page 92.
- ↑ Afterward, first earl of Mansfield, the celebrated lord chief justice of the king's bench.
