of pure disinterested charity. This is one amongst many of your
shining qualities which distinguish you from others of your rank.
But let me add a farther truth--that without these ties of
gratitude, and abstracting from them all, I have a most particular
inclination to honour you, and, if it were not too bold an
expression, to say I love you. It is no shame to be a poet, though
it is to be a bad one. Augustus Caesar of old, and Cardinal
Richelieu of late, would willingly have been such; and David and
Solomon were such. You who, without flattery, are the best of the
present age in England, and would have been so had you been born in
any other country, will receive more honour in future ages by that
one excellency than by all those honours to which your birth has
entitled you, or your merits have acquired you.


"Ne forte pudori
Sit tibi Musa lyrae solers, et cantor Apollo."


I have formerly said in this epistle that I could distinguish your
writings from those of any others; it is now time to clear myself
from any imputation of self-conceit on that subject. I assume not
to myself any particular lights in this discovery; they are such
only as are obvious to every man of sense and judgment who loves
poetry and understands it. Your thoughts are always so remote from
the common way of thinking that they are, as I may say, of another
species than the conceptions of other poets; yet you go not out of
nature for any of them. Gold is never bred upon the surface of the
ground, but lies so hidden and so deep that the mines of it are
seldom found; but the force of waters casts it out from the bowels