met Cobham, Bathurst, Chesterfield, Lyttleton, and other lords; there some of these poets found patrons, and POPE himself discovered critics.  The contracted views of Spence have unfortunately not preserved these literary conversations, but a curious passage has dropped from the pen of Lord BOLINGBROKE, in what his lordship calls “a letter to Pope,” often probably passed over among his political tracts.  It breathes the spirit of those delightful conversations.  “My thoughts,” writes his lordship, “in what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you just as they pass through my mind—­just as they used to be when we conversed together on these or any other subject; when we sauntered alone, or as we have often done with good Arbuthnot, and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick, among the multiplied scenes of your little garden. The theatre is large enough for my ambition.”  Such a scene opens a beautiful subject for a curious portrait-painter.  These literary groups in the garden of Pope, sauntering, or divided in confidential intercourse, would furnish a scene of literary repose and enjoyment among some of the most illustrious names in our literature.

CHAPTER X.

Literary solitude.—­Its necessity.—­Its pleasures.—­Of visitors by profession.—­Its inconveniences.

The literary character is reproached with an extreme passion for retirement, cultivating those insulating habits, which, while they are great interruptions, and even weakeners, of domestic happiness, induce at the same time in public life to a secession from its cares, and an avoidance of its active duties.  Yet the vacancies of retired men are eagerly filled by the many unemployed men of the world happily framed for its business.  We do not hear these accusations raised against the painter who wears away his days by his easel, or the musician by the side of his instrument; and much less should we against the legal and the commercial character; yet all these are as much withdrawn from public and private life as the literary character.  The desk is as insulating as the library.  Yet the man who is working for his individual interest is more highly estimated than the retired student, whose disinterested pursuits are at least more profitable to the world than to himself.  La Bruyere discovered the world’s erroneous estimate of literary labour:  “There requires a better name,” he says, “to be bestowed on the leisure (the idleness he calls it) of the literary character,—­to meditate, to compose, to read and to be tranquil, should be called working.”  But so invisible is the progress of intellectual pursuits and so rarely are the objects palpable to the observers, that the literary character appears to be denied for his pursuits, what cannot be refused to every other.  That unremitting application and unbroken series of their thoughts, admired in every profession, is only complained of in that one whose professors with so much sincerity mourn over the brevity of life, which has often closed on them while sketching their works.