Who that thinks in this train, but must see the world, and its contemptible grandeurs, lessen before him at every thought?  It is enough to make one remain stupefied in a poise of inaction, void of all desires, of all designs, of all friendships.

But we must return (through our very condition of being) to our narrow selves, and those things that affect ourselves:  our passions, our interests flow in upon us and unphilosophize us into mere mortals.  For my part, I never return so much into myself, as when I think of you, whose friendship is one of the best comforts I have for the insignificancy of myself.

TO JONATHAN SWIFT

Friends to posterity

23 March, 1727-8.

I send you a very odd thing, a paper printed in Boston, in New England, wherein you will find a real person, a member of their parliament, of the name of Jonathan Gulliver.  If the fame of that traveller has travelled thither, it has travelled very quick, to have folks christened already by the name of the supposed author.  But if you object that no child so lately christened could be arrived at years of maturity to be elected into parliament, I reply (to solve the riddle) that the person is an Anabaptist, and not christened till full age, which sets all right.  However it be, the accident is very singular that these two names should be united.

Mr. Gay’s opera has been acted near forty days running, and will certainly continue the whole season.  So he has more than a fence about his thousand pounds; he will soon be thinking of a fence about his two thousand.  Shall no one of us live as we would wish each other to live?  Shall he have no annuity, you no settlement on this side, and I no prospect of getting to you on the other?  This world is made for Caesar,—­as Cato said, for ambitious, false, or flattering people to domineer in; nay, they would not, by their good will, leave us our very books, thoughts, or words in quiet.  I despise the world yet, I assure you, more than either Gay or you, and the court more than all the rest of the world.  As for those scribblers for whom you apprehend I would suppress my Dulness (which, by the way, for the future you are to call by a more pompous name, the Dunciad), how much that nest of hornets are my regard will easily appear to you when you read the Treatise of the Bathos.

At all adventures, yours and mine shall stand linked as friends to posterity, both in verse and prose, and (as Tully calls it) in consuetudine studiorum.  Would to God our persons could but as well and as surely be inseparable!  I find my other ties dropping from me; some worn off, some torn off, some relaxing daily:  my greatest, both by duty, gratitude, and humanity, time is shaking every moment, and it now hangs but by a thread!  I am many years the older for living so much with one so old; much the more helpless for having been so long helped and tendered