from the finest eyes in the world. I know you have tenderness; you must have it; it is the very emanation of good sense and virtue; the finest minds, like the finest metals, dissolve the easiest.

But when you are reflecting upon objects of pity, pray do not forget one, who had no sooner found out an object of the highest esteem, than he was separated from it; and who is so very unhappy as not to be susceptible of consolation, from others, by being so miserably in the right as to think other women what they really are. Such an one can't but be desperately fond of any creature that is quite different from these. If the Circassian be utterly void of such honour as these have, and such virtue as these boast of, I am content. I have detested the sound of honest woman and loving spouse, ever since I heard the pretty name of Odaliche. Dear Madam, I am for ever

Your, &c.

My most humble services to Mr. Wortley. Pray let me hear from you soon, though I shall very soon write again. I am confident half cur letters are lost.

CXXVI.

This letter, written during a visit to Bolingbroke's villa at Dawley, gives us a pleasant glimpse of that restless politician in the midst of those rural pursuits which he loved to affect. There is, we may suspect, more elegance than sincerity in the poet's language. He probably cared as little as his patron for haycocks and rakes; though Pope, as many of his letters prove, was not so insensible to the beauties of the country as some of his critics would insist.

Alexander Pope to Dean Swift.

Dawley: June 28, 1728.

I now hold the pen for my Lord Bolingbroke, who is reading your letter between two haycocks, but his attention is somewhat diverted by casting his eyes on the clouds, not in admiration of what you say, but for fear of a shower. He is pleased with your placing him in the triumvirate between yourself and me; though he says that he doubts he shall fare like Lepidus-while one of us runs away with all the power, like Augustus, and another with all the pleasures, like Antony. It is upon a foresight of this

that he has fitted up his farm, and you will agree that his scheme of retreat at least is not founded upon weak appearances. Upon his return from the Bath, all peccant humours he finds are purged out of him; and his great temperance and economy are so signal, that the first is fit for my constitution, and the latter would enable you to lay up so much money as to buy a bishopric in England. As to the return of his health and vigour, were you here, you might inquire of his haymakers; but as to his temperance, I can answer that (for one whole day) we have had nothing for dinner but mutton-broth, beans and bacon, and a barn-door fowl.

Now his lordship is run after his cart, I have a moment left to myself to tell you that I overheard him yesterday agree with a painter for £200 to paint his country-hall with trophies of rakes, spades, prongs, &c., and other ornaments, merely to countenance his calling this place a farm--now turn over a new leaf.— He bids me assure you he should be sorry not to have more schemes of kindness for his friends than of ambition for himself; there, though his schemes may be weak, the motives at least are strong; and he says further, if you could bear as great a fall and decrease of your revenues as he knows by experience he can, you would not live in Ireland an hour.

The Dunciad' is going to be printed in all pomp, with the inscription, which makes me proudest. It will be attended with proemc, prolegomena, testimonia scriptorum, index authorum, and notes variorum. As to the latter, I desire you to read over the text, and make a few in any way you like best; whether dry raillery, upon the style and way of commenting of trivial critics; or humorous, upon the authors in the poem; or historical, of persons, places, times; or explanatory, or collecting the parallel passages of the ancients. Adieu. I am pretty well, my mother not ill.

Dr. Arbuthnot vexed with his fever by intervals; I am afraid he declines, and we shall lose a worthy man: I am troubled about him very much: I am, &c.

CXXVII.

From early youth, when he would compose billets-doux for young damsels, to those later days when he corresponded with the coterie of ladies who criticised 'Pamela,' and 'Clarissa,' Samuel Richardson pursued his hobby of writing and receiving letters. Mrs. Barbauld published this correspondence with her biography of the novelist, but the interest of the letters expired with the century in which they were written. Mr. Aaron Hill was the writer who pretended to despise the public taste in literature of his day, and who prophesied that he would be read and admired when Pope was forgotten.

Samuel Richardson to Aaron Hill.

October 27, 1748.

of your favour of the much pained on your A mind so noble! so

Dear Sir,—With regard to some parts nineteenth, I will only say that I am too account to express anything but my pain. generous! so underrating intentional good from himself! so overrating trifling benefits from others! But no more on this subject. You are an alien, Sir, in this world; and no wonder that the base world treat you as such.

You are so very earnest about transferring to me the copyright to all your works, that I will only say, that that point must be left to the future issues of things. But I will keep account. I will, though I were to know how to use the value of your favours as to those issues (never can I the value of your generous intentions). You will allow me to repeat, I will keep account. It is therefore time enough to think of the blank receipt you have had the goodness to send me to fill up.

Would to heaven that all men had the same (I am sure I may call it just) opinion of your works that I have! But-shall I tell you, Sir?-The world, the taste of the world, is altered since you withdrew from it. Your writings require thought to read, and to take in their whole force; and the world has no thought to bestow. Simplicity is all their cry; yet hardly do these criers know what they mean by the noble word. They may see a thousand beauties obvious to the eye: but if there lie jewels in the mine that require labour to come at, they will not dig. I do not think, that were Milton's Paradise Lost to be now published as a new work, it

would be well received. Shakespeare, with all his beauties, would, as a modern writer, be hissed off the stage. Your sentiments, even they will have it who allow them to be noble, are too munificently adorned: and they want you to descend to their level. Will you, Sir, excuse me this freedom? Yet I can no longer excuse myself, to the love and to the veneration mingled that I bear to you, if I do not acquaint you with what the world you wish to mend says of your writings. And yet for my own part, I am convinced that the fault lies in that indolent (that lazy, I should rather call it) world. You would not, I am sure, wish to write to a future age only.-A chance too so great, that posterity will be mended by what shall be handed down to them by this. And few, very few are they who make it their study and their labour, to stem the tide of popular disapprobation or prejudice. Besides, I am of opinion that it is necessary for a genius to accommodate itself to the mode and taste of the world it is cast into, since works published in this age must take root in it to flourish in the next.

As to your title, Sir, which you are pleased to require my opinion of, let me premise, that there was a time, and that within my own remembrance, when a pompous title was almost necessary to promote the sale of a book. But the booksellers, whose business is to watch the taste and foibles of the public, soon (as they never fail on such occasions to do) wore out that fashion: and now, verifying the old observation, that good wine needs no bush, a pompous or laboured title is looked upon as a certain sign of want of merit in the performance, and hardly ever becomes an invitation to the purchaser.

As to your particular title to this great work, I have your pardon to beg, if I refer to your consideration, whether epic, truly epic, as the piece is, you would choose to call it epic in the titlepage; since hundreds who will see the title, will not, at the time, have seen your admirable definition of the word. Excuse, Sir, this freedom also, and excuse these excuses.-I am exceedingly pressed in time, and shall be for some time to come, or, sloven as I am in my pen, this should not have gone.

God forbid that I should have given you cause to say, as a recommendation, that there will be more prose than verse in your future works! I believe, Sir, that Mr. Garrick in particular has

not in any manner entered into vindictive reflections. I never saw him on the stage; but of late I am pretty well acquainted with him. I know he honours you. But he thinks you above the present low taste; (this I speak in confidence) and once I heard him say as much, and wish that you could descend to it. Hence one of the reasons that have impelled me to be so bold as I have been in this letter.

The occasion of the black wax I use, is the loss of an excellent sister. We loved each other tenderly! But my frequent, I might say constant, disorders of the nervous kind ought to remind me, as a consolation, of David's self-comfort on the death of his child, perhaps oftener than it does, immersed as I am in my own trifles, and in business, that the common parental care permits me not to quit, though it becomes every day more irksome to me than another.

I am, Sir,

With true affection,

Your most faithful,

and obedient servant

S. RICHARDSON.

CXXVIII.

This was written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her future husband shortly before her marriage, and is surely one of the most curious love-letters ever penned by a young lady to her betrothed.

She seems, however, to have been as fond of her husband as her cold and unwomanly nature would permit her to be of any man. The story of their married life is a singularly unromantic

romance.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (then Pierrepont) to

E. W. Montagu Esq.

March, 1711.

Though your letter is far from what I expected, having once promised to answer it, with the sincere account of my inmost thoughts, I am resolved you shall not find me worse than my word, which is (whatever you may think) inviolable.

:

'Tis no affectation to say, that I despise the pleasure of pleasing people whom I despise all the fine equipages that shine in the ring never gave me another thought, than either pity or contempt