hundred
livres, or else might have been imprisoned in the Bastille, upon
pretense that certain strokes in his tragedy of Cato had been
discovered which glanced at the porter of some man in power. Mr.
Addison was raised to the post of Secretary of State in England. Sir
Isaac Newton was made Master of the Royal Mint. Mr. Congreve had a
considerable employment. Mr. Prior was Plenipotentiary. Dr. Swift is
Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, and is more revered in Ireland than
the Primate himself. The religion which Mr. Pope professes[42]
excludes him, indeed, from preferments of every kind, but then it did
not prevent his gaining two hundred thousand livres by his excellent
translation of Homer. I myself saw a long time in France the author of
"Rhadamistus"[43] ready to perish for hunger. And the son of one of
the greatest men our country ever gave birth to, and who was beginning
to run the noble career which his father had set him, would have been
reduced to the extremes of misery had he not been patronized by
Monsieur Fagon.

[Footnote 42: Pope was a Catholic.]

[Footnote 43: "Rhadamiste et Zenobia," a tragedy by Crebillon (1711),
who long suffered from neglect and want.]

But the circumstance which mostly encourages the arts in England is
the great veneration which is paid them. The picture of the Prime
Minister hangs over the chimney of his own closet, but I have seen
that of Mr. Pope in twenty noblemen's houses. Sir Isaac Newton was
revered in his lifetime, and had a due respect paid to him after his
death,--the greatest men in the nation disputing who should have the
honor of holding up his pall. Go into Westminster Abbey, and you will
find that what raises the admiration of the spectator is not the
mausoleums of the English kings, but the monuments which the gratitude
of the nation has erected to perpetuate the memory of those
illustrious men who contributed to its glory. We view their statues in
that abbey in the same manner as those of Sophocles, Plato, and other
immortal personages were viewed in Athens; and I am persuaded that the
bare sight of those glorious monuments has fired more than one breast,
and been the occasion of their becoming great men.

The English have even been reproached with paying too extravagant
honors to mere merit, and censured for interring the celebrated
actress Mrs. Oldfield[44] in Westminster Abbey, with almost the same
pomp as Sir Isaac Newton. Some pretend that the English had paid