cannot give you, for they have it not to give—­liberty, which is worth all they have, and which as yet Englishmen need not ask from their hands.  You will enjoy that, and your own integrity, and the satisfactory consciousness of having not merited such graces from Courts as are bestowed only on the mean, servile, flattering, interested and undeserving.  The only steps to the favour of the great are such complacencies, such compliances, such distant decorums, as delude them in their vanities, or engage them in their passions.  He is their greatest favourite who is the falsest; and when a man, by such vile graduations arrives at the height of grandeur and power, he is then at best but in a circumstance to be hated, and in a condition to be hanged for serving their ends.  So many a Minister has found it.”

“I can only add a plain uncourtly speech,” Pope wrote again to Gay ten days later.  “While you are nobody’s servant you may be anybody’s friend, and, as such, I embrace you in all conditions of life.  While I have a shilling you shall have sixpence, nay, eightpence, if I can contrive to live upon a groat.”  But if Pope took the matter calmly, Swift, on the other hand, completely lost his temper and wrote as if voluntary attendance at Court made it obligatory upon the Queen to provide for the courtier.

DEAN SWIFT TO JOHN GAY.

  Dublin, November 27th, 1727.

“I entirely approve your refusal of that employment, and your writing to the Queen.  I am perfectly confident you have a firm enemy in the Ministry.  God forgive him, but not till he puts himself in a state to be forgiven.  Upon reasoning with myself, I should hope they are gone too far to discard you quite, and that they will give you something; which, although much less than they ought, will be (as far as it is worth) better circumstantiated; and since you already just live, a middling help will make you just tolerable.  Your lateness in life (as you so soon call it) might be improper to begin the world with, but almost the eldest men may hope to see changes in a Court.  A Minister is always seventy; you are thirty years younger; and consider, Cromwell did not begin to appear till he was older than you."[18]

* * * * *

Swift could not forgive the Court for the offer, Mrs. Howard for not exerting her influence to get a better post for her protege.  “I desire my humble service to Lord Oxford, Lord Bathurst, and particularly to Miss Blount, but to no lady at Court.  God bless you for being a greater dupe than I. I love that character too myself, but I want your charity,” he wrote to Pope, August 11th, 1729; but Pope replying on October 9th said:  “The Court lady[19] I have a good opinion of.  Yet I have treated her more negligently than you would do, because you will like to see the inside of a Court, which I do not ... after all, that lady means to do good and does no harm, which is a vast deal for a courtier.”