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only that his mind could be quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age. This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world is just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "I desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age." His contempt for mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being prime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty! Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also with the "Tale of a Tub." Its levity, if it was not something worse, twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach. Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism. Mr. Forster would have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman. Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes. He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood in his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of his greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly had the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large an element of worldly success. In
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