Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/105

friend Arbuthnot will recommend you to temperance and exercise. I wish they could have as good an effect upon the giddiness I am subject to, and which this moment I am not free from. I should have been glad if you had lengthened your letter by telling me the present condition of many of my old acquaintance, Congreve, Arbuthnot, Lewis, &c. but you mention only Mr. Pope, who I believe is lazy, or else he might have added three lines of his own. I am extremely glad he is not in your case of needing great men's favour, and could heartily wish that you were in his. I have been considering why poets have such ill success in making their court, since they are allowed to be the greatest and best of all flatterers: the defect is that they flatter only in print or in writing, but not by word of mouth: they will give things under their hand which they make a conscience of speaking. Besides, they are too libertine to haunt antichambers, too poor to bribe porters and footmen, and too proud to cringe to secondhand favourites in a great family. Tell me, are you not under original sin by the dedication of your eclogues to lord Bolingbroke? I am an ill judge at this distance; and besides, am, for my ease, utterly ignorant of the commonest things that pass in the world; but if all courts have a sameness in them (as the parsons phrase it) things may be as they were in my time^[1], when all employments went to parliamentmen's friends, who had been useful in elections, and there was always a huge list of names in arrears at the treasury, which would at least take up your seven years expedient to discharge even one half. I am of

1. At what period of time, in the English history, was not this the case, and the true state of things?

opinion