“I have nothing,” wrote Pope to his friend Cromwell, “to say to you in this latter; but I was resolved to write to tell you so.  Why should not I content myself with so many great examples of deep divines, profound casuists, grave philosophers, who have written, not letters only, but whole tomes and voluminous treatises about nothing?  Why should a fellow like me, who all his life does nothing, be ashamed to write nothing, and that, too, to one who has nothing to do but read it?” And so, with “ex nihilo nil fit,” he laughingly ends his letter.

And now, while I am at it, I must quote a passage, somewhat germane, from the very next letter, which Pope wrote to the same friend:—­“You talk of fame and glory, and of the great men of antiquity.  Pray, tell me, what are all your great dead men, but so many living letters?  What a vast reward is here for all the ink wasted by writers and all the blood spilt by princes!  There was in old time one Severus, a Roman Emperor.  I dare say you never called him by any other name in your life; and yet in his days he was styled Lucius, Septimius, Severus, Pius, Pertinax, Augustus, Parthicus, Adiabenicus, Arabicus, Maximus, and what not?  What a prodigious waste of letters has time made!  What a number have here dropped off, and left the poor surviving seven unattended!  For my own part, four are all I have to take care of; and I’ll be judged by you, if any man could live in less compass.  Well, for the future, I’ll drown all high thoughts in the Lethe of cowslip-wine; as for fame, renown, reputation, take ’em, critics!  If ever I seek for immortality here, may I be damn’d, for there’s not much danger in a poet’s being damn’d,—­

  ’Damnation follows death in other men,
  But your damn’d Poet lives and writes agen.’”

And so they do, even unto the present, otherwise blessed day.  But, dear old friend, is not this sublime sneering? and is there not an honest ray or two of truth mingled here and there in the colder coruscations of this wit?  Of the sincerity of this repudiation and renunciation so fashionable in the Pope circle I have nothing to say; but in certain moods of the mind it is vastly entertaining, and cures one’s melancholy as cautery cures certain physical afflictions.  It may be amusing for you also to notice that Don Quixote’s niece and Pope were of the same mind.  She called poetry “a catching and incurable disease,” and Pope’s unfortunate Poet “lives and writes agen.”

And, after all, Bobus, why should we not be tender with all the gentlemen who crowd the catalogues and slumber upon the shelves?  It may be all very well for you or me, whose legend should be

  “Prandeo, poto, cano, ludo, lego, coeno, quiesco,”