Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 4.djvu/151

Rh ourselves, and the world too, if it pleases;" and they can live together, and "shew what friends wits may be, in spite of all the fools in the world." All this while it was likely that the clerks did not know his hand; he certainly had no more enemies than a publick character like his inevitably excites; and with what degree of friendship the wits might live, very few were so much fools as ever to inquire, Some part of this pretended discontent he learned from Swift, and expresses it, I think, most frequently in his correspondence with him. Swift's resentment was unreasonable, but it was sincere; Pope's was the mere mimickry of his friend, a fictitious part which the began to play before it became him. When she was only twenty-five years old, he related that "a glut of study and retirement had thrown him on the world," and that there was danger left "a glut of the world should throw him back upon study and retirement." To this Swift answered with great propriety, that Pope had not yet either acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it. And, indeed, it must be some very powerful reason that can drive back to solitude Rh