Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/210

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DEAR SIR,

INCE I wrote last, I have been always upon the ramble. I have been in Oxfordshire with the duke and duchess of Queensberry, and at Petersham, and wheresoever they would carry me; but as they will go to Wiltshire without me, on Tuesday next, for two or three months, I, believe I shall then have finished my travels for this year, and shall not go farther from London, than now and then to Twickenham. I saw Mr. Pope on Sunday, who has lately escaped a very great danger; but is very much wounded across his right hand. Coming home in the dark, about a week ago, alone in my lord Bolingbroke's coach from Dawley, he was overturned, where a bridge has been broke down, near Whitton, about a mile from his own house. He was thrown into the river, with the glasses of the coach up, and was up to the knots of his periwig in water. The footman broke the glass to draw him out; by which, he thinks, he received the cut across his hand. He was afraid he should have lost the use of his little finger and the next to it; but the surgeon, whom he sent for last Sunday from London to examine it, told him that his fingers were safe, that there were two nerves cut, but no tendon. He was in very good health, and very good spirits, and the wound in a fair way of being soon healed. The instructions you sent me to communicate to the doctor about the singer,