Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 14.djvu/140

132 one by one; and often, those parts which attract most at first sight, will appear to be not the most, but the least considerable.

I am pleased and flattered by your expression of orna me. The chief pleasure this work can give me is, that I can in it, with propriety, decency, and justice, insert the name and character of every friend I have, and every man that deserves to be loved or adorned. But I smile at your applying that phrase to my visiting you in Ireland; a place where I might have some apprehension (from their extraordinary passion for poetry, and their boundless hospitality) of being adorned to death and buried under the weight of garlands, like one I have read of somewhere or other. My mother lives (which is an answer to that point) and I thank God though her memory be in a manner gone, is yet awake and sensible to me, though scarce to any thing else; which doubles the reason of my attendance, and at the same time sweetens it. I wish (beyond any other wish) you could pass a summer here; I might (too probably) return with you, unless you preferred to see France first, to which country I think you would have a strong invitation. Lord Peterborow has narrowly escaped death, and yet keeps his chamber: he is perpetually speaking in the most affectionate manner of you: he has written you two letters which you never received, and by that has been discouraged from writing more. I can well believe the postoffice may do this, when some letters of his to me have met the same fate, and two of mine to him. Yet let not this discourage you from writing to me, or to him enclosed in the common way, as I do to you: innocent men need fear no detection of their thoughts;