Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 14.djvu/47

Rh building and planting, and especially of your subterranean passage to your garden, whereby you turned a blunder into a beauty, which is a piece of Ars Poetica.

I have almost done with harridans, and shall soon become old enough to fall in love with girls of fourteen. The lady whom you describe to live at court, to be deaf, and no party woman, I take to be mythology, but know not how to moralize it. She cannot be Mercy, for Mercy is neither deaf, nor lives at court: Justice is blind, and perhaps deaf, but neither is she a court lady: Fortune is both blind and deaf, and a court lady, but then she is a most damnable party woman, and will never make me easy, as you promise. It must be Riches which answers all your description: I am glad she visits you, but my voice is so weak, that I doubt she will never hear me.

Mr. Lewis sent me an account of Dr. Arbuthnot's illness, which is a very sensible affliction to me, who by living so long out of the world, have lost that hardness of heart contracted by years and general conversation. I am daily losing friends, and neither seeking nor getting others. O if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my travels! but however he is not without fault: there is a passage in Bede, highly commending the piety and learning of the Irish in that age, where, after abundance of praises, he overthrows them all, by lamenting that alas! they kept Easter at a wrong time of the year. So our doctor has every quality and virtue that can make a man amiable or useful; but alas, he hath a sort of slouch in his walk! I Rh