eat? (meaning the Rhapsodists who lived by repeating his verses ;) thus may it be said of Mr. Durfey to his detractors: Dares any one despise him who has made so many men drink? Alas, Sir! this is a glory which neither you nor I must ever pretend to. Neither you with your Ovid, nor I with my Statius, can amuse a board of justices and extraordinary 'squires, or gain one hum of approbation, or laugh of admiration. These things (they would say) are too studious; they may do well enough with such as love reading, but give us your ancient poet Mr. Durfey!* It is mortifying enough, it must be confessed; but, however, let us proceed in the way that Nature has directed Multi multa scient, sed nemo omnia, as is said in the almanack. Let us communicate our works for our mutual comfort: send me elegies, and you shall not want heroics. At present, I have only these arguments in prose to the Thebaid, which you claim by promise, as I do your translation of Pars me Sulmo tenet,—and the Ring ; the rest I hope for as soon as you can conveniently transcribe them, and whatsoever orders you are pleased to give me shall be punctually obeyed by Your, &c. us * He was every summer invited to a fishing-party at Mr. Jones's of Ramsbury, a man of considerable property in Wiltshire. Harte told me his friend Fenton alluded to this visit in his elegant Epistle to Lambard: By long experience, Durfey may, no doubt, Warton. LETTER XII. TO MR. CROMWELL. May 10, 1710. I HAD not so long omitted to express my acknowledgements to you for so much good-nature and friendship as you lately shewed me; but that I am but just returned to my own hermitage, from Mr. C's,* who has done me so many favours, that I am almost inclined to think my friends infect one another, and that your conversation with him has made him as obliging to me as yourself. I can assure you, he has a sincere respect for you, and this, I believe, he has partly contracted from me, who am too full of you not to overflow upon those I converse with. But I must now be contented to converse only with the dead of this world; that is to say, the dull and obscure, every way obscure, in their intellects as well as their persons or else have recourse to the living dead, the old authors with whom you are so well acquainted, even from Virgil down to Aulus Gellius, whom I do not think a critic by any means to be compared to Mr. Dennis: and I must declare positively to you, that I will persist in this opinion, till you become a little more civil to Atticus. Who could have imagined, that he, who had escaped all the misfortunes of his time, unhurt even by the * Probably Mr. Caryl, with whom he was at this time intimate, and at whose instance he wrote the Rape of the Lock. proscriptions of Antony and Augustus, should in these days find an enemy more severe and barbarous than those tyrants? and that enemy the gentlest too, the best natured of mortals, Mr. Cromwell, whom I must in this compare once more to Augustus; who seemed not more unlike himself in the severity of one part of his life and the clemency of the other, than you. I leave you to reflect on this, and hope that time (which mollifies rocks, and of stiff things makes limber) will turn a resolute critic to a gentle reader; and instead of this positive, tremendous, new-fashioned Mr. Cromwell, restore unto us our old acquaintance, the soft, beneficent, and courteous Mr. Cromwell. I expect much, towards the civilizing of you in your critical capacity, from the innocent air and tranquillity of our forest, when you do me the favour to visit it. In the mean time, it would do well by way of preparative, if you would duly and constantly every morning read over a pastoral of Theocritus or Virgil; and let the lady Isabella put your Macrobius and Aulus Gellius somewhere out of your way, for a month or so. Who knows but travelling and long airing in an open field, may contribute more successfully to the cooling a critic's severity, than it did to the assuaging of Mr. Cheek's anger of old? In these fields, you will be secure of finding no enemy, but the most faithful and affectionate of your friends, &c. LETTER XIII. TO MR. CROMWELL. May 17, 1710. AFTER I had recovered from a dangerous illness, which was first contracted in town about a fortnight after my coming hither, I troubled you with a letter, and paper* inclosed, which you had been so obliging as to desire a sight of when last I saw you, promising me in return some translations of yours from Ovid. Since when I have not had a syllable from your hands, so that it is to be feared, that though I have escaped death, I have not oblivion. I should at least have expected you to have finished that elegy upon me, which you told me you was upon the point of beginning when I was sick in London; if you will but do so much for me first, I will give you leave to forget me afterwards; and for my own part will die at discretion, and at my leisure. But I fear I must be forced, like many learned authors, to write my own epitaph, if I would be remembered at all. Monsieur de la Fontaine's would fit me to a hair, but it is a kind of sacrilege (do you think it is not?) to steal epitaphs. In my present living dead condition nothing would be properer than Oblitusque meorum, obliviscendus et illis; but that unluckily I cannot forget my friends, and the civi * Verses on Silence, in imitation of the Earl of Rochester's poem on Nothing; done at fourteen years old. Pope. lities I received from yourself, and some others. They say indeed it is one quality of generous minds to forget the obligation they have conferred, and perhaps too it may be so to forget those on whom they conferred them. Then indeed I must be forgotten to all intents and purposes! I am, it must be owned, dead in a natural capacity, according to Mr. Bickerstaff; dead in a poetical capacity, as a damned author; and dead in a civil capacity, as a useless member of the commonwealth. But reflect, dear Sir, what melancholy effects may ensue, if dead men are not civil to one another if he who has nothing to do himself will not comfort and support another in his idleness: if those who are to die themselves, will not now and then pay the charity of visiting a tomb and a dead friend, and strowing a few flowers over him! In the shades where I am, the inhabitants have a mutual compassion for each other, being all alike inanes; we saunter to one another's habitations, and daily assist each other in doing nothing at all. This I mention for your edification and example, that all alive as you are, you may not sometimes disdain-desipere in loco. Though you are no papist, and have not so much regard to the dead as to address yourself to them, (which I plainly perceive by your silence,) yet I hope you are not one of those heterodox, who hold them to be totally insensible of the good offices and kind wishes of their living friends, and to be in a dull state of sleep without one dream of those they left behind |