Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 14.djvu/166

158 such friends as you: you are to me like a limb lost, and buried in another country; though we seem quite divided, every accident makes me feel you were once a part of me. I always consider you so much as a friend, that I forget you are an author, perhaps too much; but it is as much as I would desire you would do to me. However if I could inspirit you to bestow correction upon those three treatises which you say are so near completed, I should think it a better work than any I can pretend to of my own. I am almost at the end of my morals, as I have been, long ago, of my wit; my system is a short one, and my circle narrow. Imagination has no limits, and that is a sphere in which you may move on to eternity; but where one is confined to truth (or to speak more like a human creature, to the appearances of truth) we soon find the shortness of our tether. Indeed by the help of a metaphysical chain of ideas, one may extend the circulation, go round and round for ever, without making any progress beyond the point to which Providence has pinned us: but this does not satisfy me, who would rather say a little to no purpose, than a great deal. Lord Bolingbroke is voluminous, but he is voluminous only to destroy volumes. I shall not live, I fear, to see that work printed; he is so taken up still, (in spite of the monitory hint given in the first line of my Essay) with particular men, that he neglects mankind, and is still a creature of this world, not of the universe: this world, which is a name we give to Europe, to England, to Ireland, to London, to Dublin, to the court, to the castle, and so diminishing, till it comes to our own affairs, and our own persons. When you write (either to him or to me, for we accept it all as one) rebuke him for