next to the seeing you, would be the greatest satisfaction to your most affectionate friend and humble servant, J. G."

"DEAR MR. ARCHDEACON:-Though my proportion of this epistle should be but a sketch in miniature, yet I take up this half page, having paid my club with the good company both for our dinner of chops and for this paper. The poets will give you lively descriptions in their way; I shall only acquaint you with that which is directly my province. I have just set the last hand to a couplet; for so I may call two nymphs in one piece. They are Pope's favourites, and though few, you will guess must have cost me more pains than any nymphs can be worth. He has been so unreasonable as to expect that I should have made them as beautiful upon canvas as he has done upon paper. If this same Mr. P. should omit to write for the dear frogs, and the Pervigilium, I must entreat you not to let me languish for them, as I have done ever since they have crossed the seas: remember by what neglects, &c., we missed them when we lost you, and therefore I have not yet forgiven any of those triflers that let them escape and run those hazards. I am going on at the old rate, and want you and the Dean prodigiously, and am in hopes of making you a visit this summer, and of hearing from you both, now you are together. Fortescue, I am

sure, will be concerned that he is not in Cornhill, to set his hand to these presents, not only as a witness, but as a serviteur très-humble,

"C. JERVAS."

"It is so great an honour to a poor Scotchman to be remembered at this time of day, especially by an inhabitant of the Glacialis Ierne, that I take it very thankfully, and have, with my good friends, remembered you at our table in the chophouse in Exchange-alley. There wanted nothing to complete our happiness but your company, and our dear friend the Dean's. I am sure the whole entertainment would have been to his relish. Gay has got so much money by his 'Art of Walking the Streets,' that he is ready to set up his equipage; he is just going to the Bank to negotiate some exchange-bills. Mr. Pope delays his second volume of his Homer till the martial spirit of the rebels is quite quelled; it being judged that the first part did some harm that way. Our love again and again to the dear Dean. Fuimus torys, I can say no more. ARBUTHNOT."

“When a man is conscious that he does no good himself, the next thing is to cause others to do some. I may claim some merit this way, in hastening this testimonial from your friends abovewriting: their love to you indeed wants no spur, their ink wants no pen, their pen wants no hand,

their hand wants no heart, and so forth, (after the manner of Rabelais, which is betwixt some meaning and no meaning); and yet it may be said, when present thought and opportunity is wanting, their pens want ink, their hands want pens, their hearts want hands, &c., till time, place, and conveniency concur to set them writing, as at present, a sociable meeting, a good dinner, warm fire, and an easy situation do, to the joint labour and pleasure of this epistle.

"Wherein if I should say nothing I should say much, (much being included in my love,) though my love be such, that if I should say much, I should yet say nothing, it being (as Cowley says) equally impossible either to conceal or to express it.

"If I were to tell you the thing I wish above all things, it is to see you again; the next is to see here your treatise of Zoilus, with the Batrachomuomachia, and the Pervigilium Veneris, both of which poems are master-pieces in several kinds; and I question not the prose is as excellent in its sort as the Essay on Homer. Nothing can be more glorious to that great author, than that the same hand that raised his best statue, and decked it with its old laurels, should also hang up the scarecrow of his miserable critic, and gibbet up the carcass of Zoilus, to the terror of the witlings of posterity. More, and much more, upon this and a thousand other subjects, will be the matter

of my next letter, wherein I must open all the friend to you. At this time I must be content with telling you, I am faithfully your most affectionate and humble servant, A. POPE."

If we regard this letter with a critical eye, we must find it indifferent enough; if we consider it as a mere effusion of friendship, in which every writer contended in affection, it will appear much to the honour of those who wrote it. To be mindful of an absent friend in the hours of mirth and feasting, when his company is least wanted, shows no slight degree of sincerity. Yet probably there was still another motive for writing thus to him in conjunction. The above named, together with Swift and Parnell, had some time before formed themselves into a society, called the Scribblerus Club, and I should suppose they commemorated him thus, as being an absent member.

It is past a doubt that they wrote many things in conjunction, and Gay usually held the pen; and yet I do not remember any productions which were the joint effort of this society, as doing it honour.

There is something feeble and quaint in all their attempts, as if company repressed thought, and genius wanted solitude for its boldest and happiest exertions. Of those productions in which Parnell had a principal share, that of the Origin of the Sciences from the Monkeys in Ethiopia,

is particularly mentioned by Pope himself, in some manuscript anecdotes which he left behind him. The Life of Homer, also, prefixed to the translation of the Iliad, is written by Parnell and corrected by Pope; and, as that great poet assures us in the same place, this correction was not effected without great labour. "It is still stiff,” says he, "and was written still stiffer; as it is, I verily think it cost me more pains in the correcting than the writing it would have done."† All this may be easily credited; for every thing of Parnell's that has appeared in prose, is written in a very awkward, inelegant manner. It is true, his productions teem with imagination, and show great learning; but they want that ease and sweetness for which his poetry is so much admired, and the language is also shamefully incorrect. Yet, though all this must be allowed, Pope should have taken care not to leave his errors upon record against him, or put it in the power of envy to tax his friend with faults that do not appear in what he has left to the world. A poet has a right to expect the same secrecy in his friend as in his confessor; the sins he discovers are not divulged for punishment but pardon. Indeed, Pope is almost inexcusable in this

["The Origin of the Sciences from the Monkeys in Ethiopia, was written by me, Dean Parnell, and Dr. Arbuthnot." POPE: Spence's Anecdotes, p. 201. Singer's edit. 1820.] † [Spence's Anecdotes, p. 138.]