letter; and your seeming to take his kindly, gives me hopes you will look upon this as a sincere effect of friendship. Indeed as I cannot but own the laziness with which you tax me, and with which I may equally charge you, for both of us have had (and one of us has both had and given[1]) a surfeit of writing; so I really thought you would know yourself to be so certainly entitled to my friendship, that it was a possession you could not imagine stood in need of any farther deeds or writings to assure you of it.
Whatever you seem to think of your withdrawn and separate state at this distance, and in this absence; dean Swift lives still in England, in every place and company where he would choose to live, and I find him in all the conversations I keep, and in all the hearts in which I desire any share.
We have never met these many years without mention of you. Beside my old acquaintance, I have found that all my friends of a later date, are such as were yours before: lord Oxford, lord Harcourt, and lord Harley, may look upon me as one entailed upon them by you: lord Bolingbroke is now returned (as I hope) to take me with all his other hereditary rights: and, indeed, he seems grown so much a philosopher, as to set his heart upon some of them as little, as upon the poet you gave him. It is surely my ill fate, that all those I most loved, and with whom I most lived, must be banished. After both of you left England, my constant host was the bishop of Rochester[2]. Sure this is a nation that
- ↑ Alluding to his large work on Homer.
- ↑ Dr.Atterbury.
