Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 13.djvu/395

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SUMMER-SEAT, SIR,

WAS favoured some time ago with your most obliging letter, wherein you are pleased to say so many civil things to me, that I have been altogether at a loss how to make proper acknowledgments for the honour you have done me. The commendations you are so good as to bestow upon me, would make my vanity insufferable to my neighbours, if I were not conscious that I do not deserve them; and although I shall always account it a great unhappiness to me that I never have been in your company, yet this advantage I have from it, that my faults are unknown to you. If I have any thing commendable about me, I sincerely own myself indebted to you for it, having endeavoured as much as I could to model myself by the useful instructions that are to be gathered from your works; for which my sex in general (although I believe some of them do not think so) is highly obliged to you. The opinion you are pleased to entertain of me, I fancy is owing to my uncle's partiality, who has frequently been so kind as to take pains to make persons unacquainted with me think better of me than afterward they found I deserved. I have great reason to complain of his treatment in this particular; but in all others I have met with so much kindness from him, that I must think it my duty to lay hold of every  nity