as soon fly as do either. It is your pride or laziness, more than
chair-hire, that makes the town expensive. No honour is lost by
walking in the dark; and in the day you may beckon a blackguard
boy under a gate, near your visiting place, (experto crede,) save
elevenpence, and get half-a-crown's worth of health. The worst of my
present misfortune is, that I eat and drink, and can digest neither
for want of exercise; and, to increase my misery, the knaves are
sure to find me at home, and make huge void spaces in my cellars. I
congratulate with you for losing your great acquaintance; in such a
case, philosophy teaches that we must submit, and be content with good
ones. I like Lord Cornbury's refusing his pension, but I demur at his
being elected for Oxford; which, I conceive, is wholly changed; and
entirely devoted to new principles; so it appeared to me the two last
times I was there. I find by the whole cast of your letter, that you
are as giddy and as volatile as ever: just the reverse of Mr. Pope,
who has always loved a domestic life from his youth. I was going to
wish you had some little place that you could call your own, but, I
profess I do not know you well enough to contrive any one system
of life that would please you. You pretend to preach up riding and
walking to the duchess, yet from my knowledge of you after twenty
years, you always joined a violent desire of perpetually shifting
places and company, with a rooted laziness, and an utter impatience of
fatigue. A coach and six horses is the utmost exercise you can bear;
and this only when you can fill it with such company as is best suited
to your taste, and how glad would you be if it could waft you in the
air to avoid jolting; while I, who am so much later in life, can,
or at least could, ride five hundred miles on a trotting horse. You
mortally hate writing, only because it is the thing you chiefly ought
to do; as well to keep up the vogue you have in the world, as to make
you easy in your fortune. You are merciful to everything but money,