have any latent kindness still at the bottom of your heart for me; say something very kind to me, for I don't dislike being cajoled. If your heart tells you nothing, say nothing, that I may take the hint, and wean myself from you by degrees. Whether I shall compass it or not, God knows: but, surely this is the properest place in the world to renounce friendship in, or to forget obligations. Mr. Ford says he will be with us again by the beginning of the winter. Your Star will probably hinder you from taking the same journey. Adieu, dear Dean. I had something more to say to you, almost as important as what I have said already, but company comes in upon me, and relieves you.

CXXI

To Swift, Pope, and Gay this little trifle was addressed by their restless correspondent in one of his cheery moments.

Lord Bolingbroke to the Three Yahoos of Twickenham, Jonathan, Alexander, John.

From the banks of the Severn: July 23, 1726.

Though you are probably very indifferent where I am, or what I am doing; yet I resolve to believe the contrary. I persuade myself that you have sent at least fifteen times within this fortnight to Dawley farm, and that you are extremely mortified at my long silence. To relieve you therefore from this great anxiety of mind, I can do no less than write a few lines to you; and I please myself beforehand with the vast pleasure which this epistle must needs give you. That I may add to this pleasure, and give you further proofs of my beneficent temper, I will likewise inform you, that I shall be in your neighbourhood again by the end of next week; by which time I hope that Jonathan's imagination of business will be succeeded by some imagination more becoming a professor of that divine science, la bagatelle.

Adieu, Jonathan, Alexander, John! Mirth be with you.

CXXII.

This joint epistle was written at the time Lord Bolingbroke's second wife, the niece of Madame de Maintenon, was in failing health. Pope's allusion to his mother is one of the many touching illustrations of the best trait in his character.

Lord Bolingbroke and Alexander Pope to Dean Swift.
March 29, 1731.

I have delayed several posts answering your letter of January last, in hopes of being able to speak to you about a project which concerns us both, but me the most, since the success of it would bring us together. It has been a good while in my head and at my beart; if it can be set a-going you shall hear of it. I was ill in the beginning of the winter for near a week, but in no danger either from the nature of my distemper or from the attendance of three physicians. Since that bilious intermitting fever I have had, as I had before, better health than the regard I have paid to health deserves. We are both in the decline of life, my dear dean, and have been some years going down the hill; let us make the passage as smooth as we can. Let us fence against physical evil by care and the use of those means which experience must have pointed out to us: let us fence against moral evil by philosophy. I renounce the alternative you propose. But we may, nay (if we will follow nature, and do not work up imagination against her plainest dictates), we shall of course, grow every year more indifferent to life, and to the affairs and interests of a system out of which we are soon to go. This is much better than stupidity. The decay of passion strengthens philosophy, for passion may decay and stupidity not succeed. Passions (says Pope, our divine, as you will see one time or other), are the gales of life; let us not complain that they do not blow a storm. What hurt does age do us in subduing what we toil to subdue all our lives? It is now six in the morning; I recal the time (and am glad it is over) when about this hour I used to be going to bed, surfeited with pleasure or jaded with business; my head often full of schemes, and my heart as often full of anxiety. Is it a misfortune, think you, that I rise at this hour refreshed, serene, and calm? that the past and even the present affairs of life stand like objects at a distance from me, where I can keep off the disagreeables so as not to be strongly affected by them, and from whence I can draw the others nearer to me. Passions in their force would bring all these, nay, even future contingencies, about my ears at once, and reason would but ill defend me in the scuffle.

I leave Pope to speak for himself, but I must tell you how

much my wife is obliged to you. She says she would find strength enough to nurse you if you were here, and yet, God knows, she is extremely weak; the slow fever works under and mines the constitution; we keep it off sometimes, but still it returns and makes new breaches before nature can repair the old ones. I am not ashamed to say to you that I admire her more every hour of my life: Death is not to her the King of terrors; she beholds him without the least. When she suffers much she wishes for him as a deliverer from pain; when life is tolerable she looks on him with dislike, because he is to separate her from those friends to whom she is more attached than to life itself. You shall not stay for my next as long as you have for this letter, and in every one Pope shall write something much better than the scraps of old philosophers, which were the presents, munuscula, that stoical fop Seneca used to send in every epistle to his friend Lucilius.

P.S. By Alexander Pope.

My lord has spoken justly of his lady; why not I of my mother? Yesterday was her birthday, now entering on the ninety-first year of her age; her memory much diminished, but her senses very little hurt, her sight and hearing good; she sleeps not ill, eats moderately, drinks water, says her prayers; and this is all she does. I have reason to thank God for continuing so long to me a very good and tender parent, and for allowing me to exercise for some years those cares which are now as necessary to her as hers have been to me. An object of this sort daily before one's eyes very much softens the mind, but perhaps may hinder it from the willingness of contracting other ties of the like domestic nature when one finds how painful it is even to enjoy the tender pleasures. I have formerly made so strong efforts to get and to deserve a friend; perhaps it were wiser never to attempt it, but live extempore, and look upon the world only as a place to pass through, just pay your hosts their due, disperse a little charity, and hurry on. Yet am I just now writing (or rather planning) a book to make mankind look upon this life with comfort and pleasure, and put morality in good humour. And just now, too,

The Essay on Man.

I am going to see one I love tenderly, and tomorrow to entertain several civil people, whom if we call friends it is by the courtesy of England. Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras. While we do live we must make the best of life.

Cantantes licet usque (minus via lædat) eamus

as the shepherd said in Virgil when the road was long and heavy. I am yours.

CXXIII.

In the midst of Dr. Berkeley's voluminous and not very lively correspondence there is a refreshing descriptive account of the Island of Inarime (the modern Ischia), addressed to Pope from the Doctor's winter quarters at Naples.

Dr. Berkeley to Alexander Pope.

Naples: October 22, 1717.

I have long had it in my thoughts to trouble you with a letter, but was discouraged for want of something that I could think worth sending fifteen hundred miles. Italy is such an exhausted subject, that, I dare say, you'd easily forgive my saying nothing of it; and the imagination of a poet is a thing so nice and delicate, that it is no easy matter to find out images capable of giving pleasure to one of the few, who (in any age) have come up to that character. I am nevertheless lately returned from an island where I passed three or four months; which, were it set out in its true colours, might, methinks, amuse you agreeably enough for a minute or two. The island Inarime is an epitome of the whole earth, containing, within the compass of eighteen miles, a wonderful variety of hills, vales, ragged rocks, fruitful plains, and barren mountains, all thrown together in a most romantic confusion. The air is, in the hottest season, constantly refreshed by cool breezes from the sea. The vales produce excellent wheat and Indian corn, but are mostly covered with vineyards intermixed with fruit-trees. Besides the common kinds, as cherries, apricots, peaches, &c. they produce oranges, limes, almonds, pomegranates, figs, water-melons, and many other fruits unknown to our climates, which lie every where open to the passenger. The hills are the greater part covered to the top with vines, some with chesnut groves, and others with thickets of myrtle and lentiscus. The

fields in the northern side are divided by hedgerows of myrtle. Several fountains and rivulets add to the beauty of this landscape, which is likewise set off by the variety of some barren spots and naked rocks. But that which crowns the scene, is a large mountain rising out of the middle of the island (once a terrible Volcano, by the ancients called Mons Epomeus). Its lower parts are adorned with vines and other fruits, the middle affords pasture to flocks of goats and sheep; and the top is a sandy pointed rock, from which you have the finest prospect in the world, surveying at one view, besides several pleasant islands lying at your feet, a tract of Italy about three hundred miles in length, from the promontory of Antium to the Cape of Palinurus; the greater part of which hath been sung by Homer and Virgil, as making a considerable part of the travels and adventures of their two heroes. The islands Caprea, Prochyta, and Parthenope, together with Cajeta, Cumæ, Monte Miseno, the habitations of Circe, the Syrens, and the Lastrigones, the bay of Naples, the promontory of Minerva, and the whole Campagnia felice, make but a part of this noble landscape; which would demand an imagination as warm, and numbers as flowing, as your own, to describe it. The inhabitants of this delicious isle, as they are without riches and honours, so are they without the vices and follies that attend them; and were they but as much strangers to revenge as they are to avarice and ambition, they might in fact answer the poetical notions of the golden age. But they have got, as an alloy to their happiness, an ill habit of murdering one another on slight offences. We had an instance of this the second night after our arrival, a youth of sixteen being shot dead by our door: and yet by the sole secret of minding our own business, we found a means of living securely among those dangerous people. Would you know how we pass the time at Naples? Our chief entertainment is the devotion of our neighbours. Besides the gaiety of their churches (where folks go to see what they call una bella Devotione, i.e. a sort of religious opera), they make fireworks almost every week out of devotion; the streets are often hung with arras out of devotion; and (what is still more strange) the ladies invite gentlemen to their houses, and treat them with music and sweetmeats, out of devotion: in a word, were it not for this devotion of its inhabitants, Naples would have little else to recommend it beside the air and situation.