by her; much the more considerate and tender, for a daily commerce with one who required me justly to be both to her; and consequently the more melancholy and thoughtful; and the less fit for others, who want only in a companion or a friend to be amused or entertained.  My constitution too has had its share of decay as well as my spirits, and I am as much in the decline at forty as you at sixty.  I believe we should be fit to live together could I get a little more health, which might make me not quite insupportable.  Your deafness would agree with my dulness; you would not want me to speak when you could not hear.  But God forbid you should be as destitute of the social comforts of life as I must when I lose my mother; or that ever you should lose your more useful acquaintance so utterly, as to turn your thoughts to such a broken reed as I am, who could so ill supply your wants.  I am extremely troubled at the return of your deafness; you cannot be too particular in the accounts of your health to me; everything you do or say in this kind obliges me, nay, delights me, to see the justice you do me in thinking me concerned in all your concerns; so that though the pleasantest thing you can tell me be that you are better or easier; next to that it pleases me that you make me the person you would complain to.

As the obtaining the love of valuable men is the happiest end I know of this life, so the next felicity is to get rid of fools and scoundrels; which I cannot but own to you was one part of my design in falling upon these authors, whose incapacity is not greater than their insincerity, and of whom I have always found (if I may quote myself),

  That each bad author is as bad a friend.

This poem will rid me of these insects.

  Cedite, Romani scriptores, cedite, Graii;
  Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade.

I mean than my Iliad; and I call it Nescio quid, which is a degree of modesty; but however, if it silence these fellows, it must be something greater than any Iliad in Christendom.  Adieu.

TO THE SAME

A farming friend, and the Dunciad

Dawley, 28 June, 1728.

I now hold the pen for my Lord Bolingbroke, who is reading your letter between two haycocks, but his attention is somewhat diverted by casting his eyes on the clouds, not in admiration of what you say, but for fear of a shower.  He is pleased with your placing him in the triumvirate between yourself and me:  though he says, that he doubts he shall fare like Lepidus, while one of us runs away with all the power, like Augustus, and another with all the pleasures, like Anthony.  It is upon a foresight of this that he has fitted up his farm, and you will agree that his scheme of retreat at least is not founded upon weak appearances.  Upon his return from the Bath, all peccant humours, he finds, are purged out