genealogy with another execution:  how low is he sunk now from those views! and how entertaining to have lived to see all those virtuous patriots proclaiming their mutual iniquities!  Your friend Mr. Doddington, it seems, is so reduced as to be relapsing into virtue.  In my last I told you some curious anecdotes of another part of the band, of Pope and Bolingbroke.  The friends of the former have published twenty pamphlets against the latter; I say against the latter, for, as there is no defending Pope, they are reduced to satirize Bolingbroke.  One of them tells him how little he would be known himself from his own writings, if he were not immortalized in Pope’s; and still more justly, that if be destroys Pope’s moral character, what will become of his own, which has been retrieved and sanctified by the embalming art of his friend?  However, there are still new discoveries made every day of Pope’s dirty selfishness.  Not content with the great profits which he proposed to make of the work in question, he could not bear that the interest of his money should be lost till Bolingbroke’s death; and therefore told him that it would cost very near as much to have the press set for half-a-dozen copies as it would for a complete edition, and by this means made Lord Bolingbroke pay very near the whole expense of the fifteen hundred.  Another story I have been told on this occasion, was of a gentleman who, making a visit to Bishop Atterbury in France, thought to make his court by commending Pope.  The Bishop replied not:  the gentleman doubled the dose — at last the Bishop shook his head, and said, “Mens curva in corpore curvo!” The world will now think justly of these men:  that Pope was the greatest poet, but not the most disinterested man in the world; and that Bolingbroke had not all those virtues and not all those talents which the other so proclaimed; and that be did not even deserve the friendship which lent him so much merit; and for the mere loan of which he dissembled attachment to Pope, to whom in his heart he was as perfidious and as false as he has been to the rest of the world.

The Duke of Devonshire has at last resigned, for the unaccountable and unenvied pleasure of shutting himself up at Chatsworth with his ugly mad Duchess;(49) the more extraordinary sacrifice, as he turned her head, rather than give up a favourite match for his son.  She has consented to live with him there, and has even been with him in town for a few days, but did not see either her son or Lady Harrington.  On his resignation he asked and obtained an English barony for Lord Besborough, whose son Lord Duncannon, you know, married the Duke’s eldest daughter.  I believe this is a great disappointment to my uncle, who hoped he would ask the peerage for him or Pigwiggin.  The Duke of Marlborough succeeds as lord steward.  Adieu!

(46) Henry Lowther, third Viscount Lonsdale, of the first creation.  He was the second son of John, the first Viscount, and succeeded his elder brother Richard in the title in 1713.  He was a lord of the bedchamber, and at one period of his life was privy seal.-D.