Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/486

 and live a winter between that and Dawley, and sometimes at Riskins, without going to London, where I now can have no occasional lodgings: but I am not yet in any condition for such removals. I would fain have you get enough against you grow old, to have two or three servants about you and a convenient house. It is hard to want those subsidia senectuti, when a man grows hard to please, and few people care whether he be pleased or not. I have a large house, yet I should hardly prevail to find one visitor, if I were not able to hire him with a bottle of wine: so that, when I am not abroad on horseback, I generally dine alone, and am thankful, if a friend will pass the evening with me. I am now with the remainder of my pint before me, and so here's your health — and the second and chief is to my Tunbridge acquaintance, my lady duchess — and I tell you that I fear my lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope (a couple of philosophers) would starve me, for even of port wine I should require half a pint a day, and as much at night: and you were growing as bad, unless your duke and duchess have mended you. Your colick is owing to intemperance of the philosophical kind; you eat without care, and if you drink less than I, you drink too little. But your inattention I cannot pardon, because I imagined the cause was removed, for I thought it lay in your forty millions of schemes by court hopes and court fears. Yet Mr. Pope has the same defect, and it is of all others the most mortal to conversation: neither is my lord Bolingbroke untinged with it: all for want of my rule Vive la bagatelle! but the doctor is the king of inattention. What a vexatious life should I lead among you? If the duchess be a rêveuse, I will