n from all Court
dependance. I dare say I shall find you the better and the honester man
for it many years hence; very probably the healthfuller, and the
cheerfuller into the bargain. You are happily rid of many cursed
ceremonies, as well as of many ill and vicious habits, of which few or
no men escape the infection, who are hackneyed and trammelled in the
ways of a Court. Princes, indeed, and Peers (the lackies of Princes) and
Ladies (the fools of Peers) will smile on you the less; but men of worth
and real friends will look on you the better. There is a thing, the only
thing which kings and queens cannot give you, for they have it not to
give--liberty, which is worth all they have, and which as yet Englishmen
need not ask from their hands. You will enjoy that, and your own
integrity, and the satisfactory consciousness of having not merited such
graces from Courts as are bestowed only on the mean, servile,
flattering, interested and undeserving. The only steps to the favour of
the great are such complacencies, such compliances, such distant
decorums, as delude them in their vanities, or engage them in their
passions. He is their greatest favourite who is the falsest; and when a
man, by such vile graduations arrives at the height of grandeur and
power, he is then at best but in a circumstance to be hated, and in a
condition to be hanged for serving their ends. So many a Minister has
found it."

"I can only add a plain uncourtly speech," Pope wrote again to Gay ten
days later. "While you are nobody's servant you may be anybody's friend,
and, as such, I embrace you in all conditions of life. While I have a
shilling you shall have sixpence, nay, eightpence, if I can contrive to
live upon a groat." But if Pope took the matter calmly, Swift, on the
other hand, completely lost his temper and wrote as if voluntary
attendance at Court made it obligatory upon the Queen to provide for the
courtier.

DEAN SWIFT TO JOHN GAY.

Dublin, November 27th, 1727.

"I entirely approve your refusal of that employment, and your writing to
the Queen. I am perfectly confident you have a firm enemy in the
Ministry. God forgive him, but not till he puts himself in a state to be
forgiven. Upon reasoning with myself, I should hope they are gone too
far to discard you quite, and that they will give you something; which,
although much less than they ought, will be (as far as it is worth)
better circumstantiated; and since you already just liv