LORD BURLINGTON AND ST. PATRICK'S CHAPTER. 221

and in his last letter he says it is done. But you say otherwise. However, I do not understand Lord Bathurst to be my cashier, but my cully and creditor upon interest; else you are a bad manager, and our money had better have been in the funds. I assure you, I will give Lord Carteret a note on him for nine guineas, which his Excellency has squeezed from many of us for a job to Buckley, the Gazetteer, who, in conjunction with a jacobite parson, is publishing a most monstrous, unreasonable edition of Thuanus. I understand the parson is only to be paid as a corrector of the press; but Buckley is to have all the profit. The parson's name is Carte.1 I wish you would occasionally inquire into this matter, for the subscribers on your side are many and glorious.

I cannot be angry enough with my Lord Burlington. I sent him an order of the Chapter of St. Patrick's, desiring the Dean would write to his Lordship about his ancestor's monument in my Cathedral. The gentlemen are all persons of dignity and consequence, of birth and fortune, not like those of your hedge. chapters in England; and it became him to send an answer to such a body, on an occasion where only the honour of his family is concerned. I desired in England that he would order the monument to be repaired, which may be done for 501., and that he would bestow a bit of land not exceeding 5l. a year, to repair it for ever, which I would have ordered to be entered in our

1 Carte, in 1722, was accused of high treason, and a reward of a £1,000 was offered for his apprehension. He fled to France, where he resided under the name of Phillips, and employed his leisure in collecting the manuscripts and printed copies of the (Latin) History of his own time by the President De Thon, and in writing an explanatory comment, without which much of the context could no longer be understood. He sold his materials to Dr. Mead, and it was agreed that Buckley should be the nominal editor. . . His valuable and laborious edition is in seven vols. folio, and was far more exact and complete, as well as more intelligible, than any which had appeared in France itself. The whole of the merit belonged to Carte.-E. De Thou's celebrated book, in question, is entitled History of My Own Times (1545-1607). Carte, his translator, was the Jacobite author of The History of England.

2 On meaning of hedge see letter of Swift, ante, to Esther Johnson, page 105.

records in the most solemn manner. This he promised me. I believe the Dean and Chapter are worth, in preferments and real estates, above ten thousand pounds a year, they being twenty-five and the Dean, and he cannot imagine they would cheat his posterity to get about 3s. 6d. a man. Pray, tell him this in the severest manner, and charge it all upon me, and so let the monument perish.

So they have taken away your lodgings [in Whitehall]. This is a sample of Walpole's magnanimity. When princes have a private quarrel with their subjects, they have always the worst of the fray. You have sent us over such a cargo of violent colds, that the well are not sufficient to attend the sick, nor have we servants left to deliver our orders. I apprehend myself to be this moment seized, for I have coughed more these three minutes past than I have done in as many years. I wish, for her own sake, that I had known the Duchess of Queensberry, because I should be a more impartial judge than you. But it was her own fault, because she never made me any advances. However, as to you, I think the obligation lies on her side, by giving her an opportunity of acting so generous and honourable a part, and so well becoming her dignity and spirit. Pray, tell her Grace that the fault was in Mr. Pope's poetical forks, and not in my want of manners1; and that I will rob Neptune of his trident rather than commit such solecism in good breeding again; and that when I return to England I will see her at the tenth message, which is one fewer than I had from another of her sex. With my humble respects to her Grace, I beg she will be your guardian,

1 Gay, in his letter, to which this is a reply, had jokingly noticed one of Swift's solecisms in eating, and exhorted him to the use of orthodox forks (as to which Swift, it seems, had been twitted by the Duchess): "never more despise a fork with three prongs; I wish, too, you would not eat from the point of your knife."

2 The Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales,

GAY, THE DUCHESS OF QUEENSBERRY, AND POLLY. 223

take care to have your money well put out, and not suffer you to run in debt or encroach on the principal. And so God continue to you the felicity of thriving by the displeasure of Courts and Ministries; and to your goddess many disgraces that may equally redound to her honour with the last.1 My most humble service to my Lord Peterborough, Lord Oxford, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Masham, Lord Bathurst, Mr. Pulteney, the Doctor, Mr. Pope and Mr. Lewis. Alas! poor Alderman Barber! I doubt he has left me nothing.2

To MR. POPE.

Dublin, Feb. 6, 1729-30.

There are three citizens' wives in this town. One of them, whose name is Grierson, a Scotch bookseller's wife. She is a very good Latin and Greek scholar, and has lately published a fine edition of Tacitus, with a Latin dedication to the LordLieutenant, and she writes carmina anglicana non contem

1 The Duchess seized the opportunity of the suppression of Polly to display her dissatisfaction [at some slight to her husband from the Government or Court] by soliciting subscriptions for the printed Play in the drawing-room at St. James's, and she made, says Lord Hervey, "even the King's servants contribute to the printing of a thing which the King had forbid being acted." The King asked her what she was doing, and she answered, "what must be agreeable, she was sure, to anybody so humane as his Majesty; for it was an act of charity, and a charity to which she did not despair of bringing his Majesty to contribute. . ." The Vice-Chamberlain was sent the next day to desire she would keep away. Upon this she wrote a note in which she said that she was "well-pleased the King had given her so agreeable a command as forbidding her the Court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a very great civility on the King and Queen."-E.

2 A false alarm. Alderman Barber survived to 1741, and left £200 to Swift.

nenda.1 The second is one Mrs. Barber, wife to a woollendraper, who is our chief poetess, and, upon the whole, has no ill genius. I fancy I have mentioned her to you formerly. The last is the bearer hereof, and the wife of a surly, rich husband, who cheeks her vein; whereas Mrs. Grierson is only well to pass; and Mrs. Barber, as it becomes the chief poetess, is but poor. The bearer's [maiden?] name is Sykins. She has a very good taste of poetry, has read much, and, as I hear, has writ one or two things with applause, which I never saw, except about six lines she sent me unknown, with a piece of sturgeon, some years ago, on my birthday. Can you show such a triumfeminate in London? They are all three great friends and favourites of Dr. Delany, and, at his desire, as well as from my own inclination, I gave her this passport to have the honour and happiness of seeing you; because she has already seen the estrich [ostrich ?], which is the only rarity, at present, in this town, and her ambition is to boast of having been well received by you, upon her return; and I do not see how you can well refuse to gratify her, for if a Christian will be an estrich, and the only estrich in a kingdom, he must suffer himself to be seen, and, what is worse, without money.

I writ this day to Mr. Lewis, to settle that scrub affair with Motte. It is now at an end, and I have all the money or receipts for it except 201., which is in Mr. Lewis's hands, so that I have come off better than you.2 I am enquiring an opportunity to send

1 She afterwards published an edition of Terence. Mrs. Barber affirms that she was not merely a Greek and Latin scholar, but was well read in History, Philosophy, and Mathematics. Mrs. Pilkington endows her with fresh accomplishments, and declares that she was a proficient in Hebrew, French, and Midwifery. To complete the wonder, she was the daughter of poor, illiterate peasants, who kept her close at needlework as long as she remained at home. The whole of her reported acquisitions had been made before she was twenty seven, at which age she died, in 1733.-E.

2 Motte purchased the copyright of Gulliver and the Miscellanies. He had been backward in his payments, and had now come to a final settlement. Swift got the full sam agreed upon for Gulliver, and therefore says he had

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you four bottles of usquebaugh. May God bless Mrs. Pope. I despair of seeing her in this world; and I believe the most pious person alive would be glad to share with her in the next.

You will see eighteen lines relating to yourself in the most whimsical paper that ever was writ, and which was never intended for the public.1

I do not call this a letter, for I know I long owe you one. I protest you must allow for the climate, and for my disposition from the sad prospect of affairs here, and the prostitute slavery of the representers of this wretched country. I have not been deaf this ten months, but my head is an ill second to my feet in the night.

TO THE COUNTESS OF SUFFOLK.

Nov. 31, 1730.

I do now pity the leisure you have to read a letter from meand this letter shall be a history.

"come off better" than Pope, who had to give up £25 of the price he was to have received for the Miscellanies, which had been less successful than was anticipated.-E.

1 The lines are in the poem entitled A Libel on Dr. Delany and Lord Carteret:

Hail! happy Pope, whose generous mind,

Detesting all the Statesmen kind,
Condemning Courts, at Courts unseen,

Refused the visits of a Queen, &c.

A few months after the date of Swift's letter Pope went to Windsor, and Mrs. Howard wrote to Gay, Aug. 22, 1730: "Mr. Pope has been to see me, Lord Burlington brought him. He dined and supped with my lady all the time he stayed. He was heartily tired, and I not much pleased, though I thought myself exceedingly obliged to him for the visit." My "lady was Lady Burlington, and from Pope's tone on the occasion to Gay it would seem that he was rather annoyed at not being admitted to the Queen. "I shall certainly," he said, "make as little Court to others as they do to me, and that will be none at all."-E.