Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 14.djvu/194

186 for I can walk six or seven miles, and ride a dozen. But I am deaf for two months together, this deafness unqualifies me for all company, except a few friends with countertenor voices, whom I can call names, if they do not speak loud enough for my ears. It is this evil that has hindered me from venturing to the Bath, and to Twitenham; for deafness being not a frequent disorder, has no allowance given it; and the scurvy figure a man affected that way makes in company, is utterly insupportable.

It was I began with the petition to you of Orna me, and now you come like an unfair merchant, to charge me with being in your debt; which by your way of reckoning I must always be, for yours are always guineas, and mine farthings; and yet I have a pretence to quarrel with you, because I am not at the head of any one of your epistles. I am often wondering how you come to excel all mortals on the subject of morality, even in the poetical way; and should have wondered more, if nature and education had not made you a professor of it from your infancy. "All the letters I can find of yours, I have fastened in a folio cover, and the rest in bundles endorsed; but, by reading their dates, I find a chasm of six years, of which I can find no copies; and yet I keep them with all possible care: but, I have been forced, on three or four occasions to send all my papers to some friends, yet those papers were all sent sealed in bundles, to some faithful friends; however, what I have, are not much above sixty." I found nothing in any one of them to be left out: none of them have any thing to do with party, of which you are the clearest of all men, by your religion, and the whole tenour of your