d that
mind must have a vast share of benevolence which can always retain
the softness of charity and love for others, when pain and disease
constitute the morbid links that perpetually bind it to self. If this
great character is my chief companion, my chief correspondent is not
less distinguished; in a word, no longer to keep you in suspense, Pope
is my companion and Swift my correspondent."

"You are fortunate, but so also are they. Your letter informed me of
Swift's honourable exile in Ireland: how does he bear it?"

"Too feelingly: his disappointments turn his blood to acid. He said,
characteristically enough, in one of his letters, that in fishing once
when he was a little boy, he felt a great fish at the end of his line,
which he drew up almost to the ground, but it dropped in, and the
disappointment, he adds, vexes him to this day, and he believes it to
be the type of all his future disappointments:* it is wonderful how
reluctantly a very active mind sinks into rest."

* In this letter Swift adds, "I should be ashamed to say this if you
[Lord Bolingbroke] had not a spirit fitter to bear your own misfortunes
than I have to think of them;" and this is true. Nothing can be more
striking, or more honourable to Lord Bolingbroke, than the contrast
between Swift's letters and that nobleman's upon the subject of their
mutual disappointments. I especially note the contrast, because it has
been so grievously the cant of Lord Bolingbroke's decriers to represent
his affection for retirement as hollow, and his resignation in adversity
as a boast rather than a fact. Now I will challenge any one _thoroughly_
and dispassionately to examine what is left to us of the life of this
great man, and after having done so, to select from all modern history
an example of one who, in the prime of life and height of ambition,
ever passed from a very active and exciting career into retirement
and disgrace, and bore the change--long, bitter, and permanent as it
was--with a greater and more thoroughly sustained magnanimity than did
Lord Bolingbroke. He has been reproached for taking part in political
contests in the midst of his praises and "affected enjoyment" of
retirement; and this, made matter of reproach, is exactly the subject on
which he seems to me the _most_ worthy of praise. For, putting aside
all motives for action, on the purity of which men are generally
incredulous, as a hatred to ill government (an antipathy wonderfully
str