we have the direct contrary; a race of young dunces and atheists, or old villains and monsters, whereof four fifths are more wicked and stupid than Chartres. Your wants are so few, that you need not be rich to supply them; and my wants are so many, that a king's seven millions of guineas would not support me.
I FIND, though I have less experience than you, the truth of what you told me some time ago, that increase of years makes men more talkative but less writative; to that degree, that I now write no letters but of plain business, or plain how-d'yes, to those few I am forced to correspond with, either out of necessity, or love, and I grow laconick even beyond laconicism; for sometimes I return only yes, or no, to questionary or petitionary epistles of half a yard long. You and lord Bolingbroke are the only men to whom I write, and always in folio. You are indeed almost the only men I know, who either can write in this age, or whose writings will reach the next: others are mere mortals. Whatever failings such men may have, a respect is due to them, as luminaries whose exaltation renders their motion a little irregular, or rather causes it to seem so to others. I am afraid to censure any thing I hear of dean Swift, because I hear it only from mortals, blind and
