Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 14.djvu/175

Rh your health; pray do not use me so ill any more. I look upon you as an estate from which I receive my best annual rents, although I am never to see it. Mr. Tickel was at the same meeting under the same real concern; and so were a hundred others of this town who had never seen you.

I read to the bishop of Derry the paragraph in your letter which concerned him, and his lordship expressed his thankfulness in a manner that became him. He is esteemed here as a person of learning, and conversation, and humanity, but he is beloved by all people.

I have nobody now left but you: pray be so kind as to outlive me, and then die as soon as you please, but without pain, and let us meet in a better place, if my religion will permit, but rather my virtue, although much unequal to yours. Pray let my lord Bathurst know how much I love him; I still insist on his remembering me, although he is too much in the world to honour an absent friend with his letters. My state of health is not to boast of; my giddiness is more or less too constant; I sleep ill, and have a poor appetite. I can as easily write a poem in the Chinese language as my own: I am as fit for matrimony as invention; and yet I have daily schemes for innumerable essays in prose, and proceed sometimes to no less than half a dozen lines, which the next morning become waste paper. What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them, as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetick, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Pray put me out of fear as soon as Rh