Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/136

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MY LORD,

EING ten years older than when I had the honour to see your excellency last, by consequence, if I am subject to any ailments, they are now ten times worse; and so it has happened. For I have been, this month past, so pestered with the return of a noise and deafness in my ears, that I had not spirit to perform the common offices of life, much less to write to your excellency, and least of all to answer so obliging and condescending a letter as that I received from you. But these ugly ten years have a worse consequence; that they utterly destroy any title to the good opinion you are pleased to express of me, as an amuser of the world and myself. To have preserved that talent, I ought, as I grew older, to have removed into a better climate, instead of being sunk for life in a worse. I imagine France would be proper for me now, and Italy ten years hence. However, I am not so bad as they would make me: for, since I left England, such a parcel of trash has been there fathered upon me, that nothing but the good judgment of my friends could hinder them from thinking me the greatest dunce alive.

There is a gentleman of this kingdom just gone for England; it is Dr. George Berkeley, dean of Derry, the best preferment among us, being worth eleven hundred pounds a year. He takes the Bath in