DEDICATES PARNELL'S " REMAINS' TO LORD OXFORD. 445 that you once permitted me that honour, in conjunction with some others who better deserved it. Yet I hope you will not wonder I am still desirous to have you think me your grateful and faithful servant. But I own I have an ambition yet farther, to have others think me so, which is the occasion I give your Lordship the trouble of this. Poor Parnell, before he died, left me the charge of publishing those few remains of his. I have a strong desire to make them, their author, and their publisher more considerable by addressing and dedicating them all to you. There is a pleasure in bearing testimony to truth, and a vanity, perhaps, which at least is as excusable as any vanity can be. I beg you, my Lord, to allow me to gratify it, in prefixing this paper of honest verses to the book. I send the book itself, which, I dare say, you will receive more satisfaction from perusing than you can from anything written upon the subject of yourself. Therefore I am a good deal in doubt whether you will care for such an addition to it. I will only say for it, that it is the only dedication I ever writ,' and shall be, whether you permit it or not, for I will not bow the knee to a less man than my Lord Oxford, and I expect to see no greater in my time." 1 This is a strange assertion. The dedication is dated Sept. 25, 1721, and, in 1714, Pope had formally dedicated the Rape of the Lock to Miss Fermor, and, in 1720, the translation of the Iliad to Congreve. Each of his Pastorals and Windsor Forest were inscribed to particular persons, and he afterwards con. tinued the practice in his Dunciad, Moral Essays, and Imitations of Horace. Few poets have turned their pieces to more account, in paying tribute to individuals.-E. Either Pope descended to flattery, or he subsequently formed a juster estimate of Lord Oxford. Pope told Spence :-"He was not a very capable Minister, and had a good deal of negligence into the bargain. He used to send trifling verses from the Court to the Scriblerus Club almost every day, and would come and talk idly with them almost every night, even when his All was at stake. He was huddled [sic] in his thoughts, and obscure in his manner of delivering them. He talked of business in so con. fused a manner, that you did not know what he was about, and every. thing he went to tell you was in the epic way: for he always began in the middle." He had been brought up a dissenter, and he used to keep After all, if your Lordship will tell my Lord Harley that I must not do this, you may depend upon a total suppression of the verses, the only copy whereof I send you. But you never shall suppress that great, sincere, and entire admiration and respect with which I am, &c.1 chaplains of various sects at his table, and among them a clergyman of the Established Church. Erasmus Lewis wrote to Swift (July 27, 1714), after the dismissal of Lord Oxford, "the Queen has told all the lords the reasons for her parting with him, viz., that he neglected all business; that he was seldom to be understood; that when he did explain himself she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he never came to her at the time she appointed; that he often came drunk; lastly, to crown all, he behaved himself towards her with bad manners, indecency, and disrespect."-E. None the less, in some of his political views he seems to have been superior to many of his Tory successors. He was opposed to engaging the country in foreign and useless wars. See a notice of him in Bolingbroke: a Political Study, 1884. 1 In reply to this flattering letter Lord Oxford, a fortnight later, writes from Brampton Castle an equally flattering one :-"Sir,-I received your packet, which could not but give me great pleasure, to see you preserve an old friend in your memory for it must needs be very agreeable to be remembered by those we highly value. But, then, how much shame did it cause me, when I read your very fine verses enclosed? My mind reproached me, how far short I came of what your great friendship and delicate pen would partially describe me. You ask my consent to publish it. To what straits does this reduce me. I look back, indeed, to those evenings I have usefully and pleasantly spent with Mr. Pope, Mr. Parnell, Dr. Swift, the doctor [Arbuthnot], &c. I should be glad the world knew you admitted me to your friend, and, since your affection is too hard for your judgment, I am contented to let the world know how well Mr. Pope can write upon a barren subject. I return you an exact copy of the verses, that I may keep the original, as a testimony of the only error you have been guilty of. I hope very speedily to embrace you in London, and to assure you of the par. ticular esteem and friendship, wherewith I am, &c." INVITES ATTERBURY TO TWICKENHAM. TO DR. ATTERBURY. 447 1 March 19, 1721-22. I am extremely sensible of the repeated favour of your kind letters, and your thoughts of me in absence, even among thoughts of much nearer concern to yourself on the one hand, and of much more importance to the world on the other, which cannot but engage you at this juncture. I am very certain of your goodwill, and of the warmth which is in you inseparable from it. Your remembrance of Twitenham is a fresh instance of that partiality. I hope the advance of the fine season will set you upon your legs, enough to enable you to get into my garden, where I will carry you up a mount, in a point of view to shew you the glory of my little kingdom. If you approve it, I shall be in danger to boast, like Nebuchadnezzar, of the things I have made, and be turned to converse, not with the beasts of the field, but with the birds of the grove, which I shall take to be no great punishment. For, indeed, I heartily despise the ways of the world, and most of the great ones of it. Oh! keep me innocent, make others great! 1 In one of his more recent letters, the Bishop had written :-"I will bring your small volume of Pastorals along with me [from Bromley to town], that you may not be discouraged from lending me books, when you find me so punctual in returning them. Shakspeare shall bear it company, and be put into your hands as clean and as fair as it came out of them, though you, I think, have been dabbling here and there with the text. I have had more reverence for the writer and the printer, and left everything standing just as I found it. However, I thank you for the pleasure you have given me, in putting me upon reading him once more before I die." In a postscript he adds:-"Addison's works came to my hand yesterday. I cannot but think it a very odd set of incidents that the book should be dedicated by a dead man to a dead man [Secretary Craggs], and even that the new patron [Lord Warwick], to whom Tickell chose to inscribe his verses, should be dead also before they were published. Had I been in the editor's place, I should have been a little apprehensive for myself, under a thought that every one who had any hand in that work was to die before the publication of it. You see, when I am conversing with you, I know not how to give over, till the very bottom of the paper admonishes me once more to bid you adieu!" And you may judge how comfortably I am strengthened in this opinion, when such as your Lordship bear testimony to its vanity and emptiness. Tinnit, inane est, with the picture of one ringing on the globe with his fingers, is the best thing I have the luck to remember in that great poet Quarles-not that I forget the Devil at bowls, which I know to be your Lordship's favourite cut, as well as favourite diversion. The situation here is pleasant, and the views rural enough to humour the most retired, and agree with the most contemplative, good air, solitary groves, and sparing diet, sufficient to make you fancy yourself (what you are in temperance, though ele vated into a greater figure by your station) one of the Fathers of the desert. Here you may think-to use an author's words, whom you so justly prefer to all his followers that you will receive them kindly, though taken from his worst work: : "That in Elijah's banquet you partake, Or sit a guest with Daniel, at his pulse." I am sincerely free with you, as you desire I should, and approve of you not having your coach here; for, if you would see Lord C, or anybody else, I have another chariot besides that little one you laughed at, when you compared me to Homer in a nutshell. But, if you would be entirely private, nobody 1 In the Emblems, Divine and Moral (1635.) Quarles who was " cup-bearer" to the sister of Charles I., and afterwards Secretary to Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, left behind him, besides the Emblems, a number of more or less quaint and eccentric quasi-religious and moral poems, somewhat in the spirit of Diogenes of Sinope-A Feast for Wormes, Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, &c. Died in 1644. 2 Paradise Regained, ii. Compare the sentiments of Milton, expressed through the Young Lady in Comus, in reply to that sophistical sorcerer:"If every just man, that now piues with want," &c. and Shelley's eloquent description of the Reformed Banquets, inaugurated by Laone: "Their feast was such as Earth, the general mother, " &c.-Revolt of Islam V. CIRENCESTER WOODS. shall know anything of the matter. 449 Believe me, my Lord, no man is with more perfect acquiescence, nay, with more willing acquiescence—not even any of your own sons of the Churchyour obedient, humble, servant. TO THE HON. ROBERT DIGBY. 1722. Your making a sort of apology for your not writing is a very genteel reproof to me. I know I was to blame, but I know I did not intend to be so, and (what is the happiest knowledge in the world) I know you will forgive me: for sure, nothing is more satisfactory than to be certain of such a friend as will overlook one's failings, since every such instance is a conviction of his kindness. If I am all my life to dwell in intentions, and never to rise to actions, I have but too much need of that gentle disposition which I experience in you. But I hope better things of myself, and fully purpose to make you a visit this summer at Sherborne. I am told you are all upon removal very speedily, and that Mrs. Mary Digby talks, in a letter to Lady Scudamore, of seeing my Lord Bathurst's Wood in her way. How much I wish to be her guide through that enchanted forest is not to be expressed. I look upon myself as the magician appropriated to the place, without whom no mortal can penetrate into the recesses of those sacred glades. I could pass whole days in only describing to her the future, and as yet visionary, beauties that are to rise in those scenes—the palace that is to be built, the pavilions that are to glitter, the colonnades that are to adorn them. Nay, |