bare saving game, without being thought an eminent hand (with which title Jacob has graciously dignified his adventurers and volunteers in poetry.) Jacob creates poets, as kings sometimes do knights, not for their honour, but for their money. Certainly he ought to be esteemed a worker of mira-cles, who is grown rich by poetry. What authors lose, their booksellers have won; I am your, etc. LETTER XXI. FROM MR. WYCHERLEY. May 26, 1709. THE last I received from you was dated the 22d of May. I take your charitable hint to me very kindly, wherein you do, like a true friend, and a true christian, and I shall endeavour to follow your advice, as well as your example.- -As for your wishing to see your friend a hermit with you, I cannot be said to leave the world, since I shall enjoy in your conversation all that I can desire of it; nay, can learn more from you alone, than from my long experience of the great, or little vulgar in it. As to the success of your poems in the late Miscellany, which I told you of in my last, upon my word I made you no compliment, for you may be assured that all sort of readers like them, except they are writers too; but for them (I must needs say) the more they like them, they ought to be the less pleased with them: so that you do not come off with a bare saving game (as you call it) but have gained so much credit at first, that you must needs support it to the last: since you set up with so great a stock of good sense, judgment, and wit, that your judgment ensures all that your wit ventures at. The salt of your wit has been enough to give a relish to the whole insipid hotch-potch it is mingled with; and you will make Jacob's ladder* raise you to immortality, by which others are turned off shamefully to their damnation (for poetic thieves as they are), who think to be saved by others good works, how faulty soever their own are but the coffee-house wits, or rather anti-wits, the critics, prove their judgments by approving your wit; and even the news-mongers and poets will own you have more invention than they; nay, the detractors or the envious, who never speak well of any body (not even of those they think well of) in their absence, yet will give you even in your absence their good word; and the critics only hate you, for being forced to speak well of you whether they will or no. All this is true upon the word of Your, &c. * If any thing profane can be witty, this allusion is so; but Boileau would never allow that such an union was possible. Jacob Tonson, whose Miscellany is here meant, was Dryden's favourite printer. Warton. LETTER XXII. FROM MR. WYCHERLEY. Aug. 11, 1709. My letters, so much inferior to yours, can only make up their scarcity of sense by their number of lines, which is like the Spaniards paying a debt of gold with a load of brass money. But to be a Plain Dealer,* I must tell you, I will revenge the raillery of your letters by printing them (as Dennis did mine +), without your knowledge too, which would be a revenge upon your judgment for the raillery of your wit; for some dull rogues (that is, the most in the world) might be such fools as to think what you said of me was in earnest: It is not the first time your great wits have gained reputation by their paradoxical or ironical praises; your forefathers have done it, Erasmus and others. For all mankind who know me must confess, he must be no ordinary genius, or little friend, who can find out any thing to commend in me seriously; who have given no sign of my judgment but my opinion of yours, nor mark of my wit, but my leaving off writing to the public now * Alluding to his own play, so called. Bowles. ↑ Dennis published his correspondence with Wycherley, Dryden, Congreve, &c. These letters may be found in the second volume of Tom Brown. What is singular, Dryden speaks of Dennis as the only person who could write a Pindaric ode! Bowles. you are beginning to shew the world what you can do by yours; whose wit is as spiritual as your judgment infallible: in whose judgment I have an implicit faith, and shall always subscribe to it to save my works, in this world, from the flames and damnation.-Pray, present my most humble service to Sir William Trumbull; for whom and whose judgment I have so profound a respect, that his example had almost made me marry, more than my nephew's ill carriage to me; having once resolved to have revenged myself upon him by my marriage, but now am resolved to make my revenge greater upon him by his marriage. LETTER XXIII. FROM MR WYCHERLEY. April 1, 1710. I HAVE had yours of the 30th of the last month, which is kinder than I desire it should be, since it tells me you could be better pleased to be sick again in town in my company, than to be well in the country without it; and that you are more impatient to be deprived of happiness than of health. Yet, my dear friend, set raillery or compliment aside, I can bear your absence (which procures your health and ease) better than I can your company, when you are in pain: for I cannot see you so without being so too. Your love to the country I do not doubt, nor do you (I hope) my love to it or you, since there I can enjoy your company without seeing you in pain to give me satisfaction and pleasure; there I can have you without rivals or disturbers; without the too civil, or the too rude without the noise of the loud or the censure of the silent: and would rather have you abuse me there with the truth, than at this distance with your compliment: since now, your business of a friend, and kindness to a friend, is by finding fault with his faults, and mending them by your obliging severity. I hope (in point of your good-nature) you will have no cruel charity for those papers of mine, you are so willing to be troubled with; which I take most infinitely kind of you, and shall acknowledge with gratitude, as long as I live. No friend can do more for his friend than preserving his reputation (nay, not by preserving his life) since by preserving his life he can only make him live about threescore or fourscore years; but by preserving his reputation he can make him live as long as the world lasts; so save him from damning when he is gone to the devil. Therefore, I pray, condemn me in private, as the thieves do their accomplices in Newgate, to save them from condemnation by the public. Be most kindly unmerciful to my poetical faults, and do with my papers, as you countrygentlemen do with your trees, slash, cut, and lop off the excrescences and dead parts of my withered bays, that the little remainder may live the longer, and increase the value of them by diminishing the |