A place for studious minds (2)

[M]ethinks, it is enough to mortify the Proudest of us all, to remember, that, altho’ we may adorn our outward Parts with fine Cloaths, and sweeten them with costly Essences, yet our Insides are no better than common Bogs, and are composed of Materials too foul to name. […] This is a true State of the human Body; and, I fear, that upon Examination, our Minds will appear but little better; and, that the Emanations of one do not surpass in Cleanliness the Voidings of the other. If we survey the learned World, as it is called, what do its modern Productions consist in, but the Excrements of Wit, and Sham-Patriotism, Bawdy, Blasphemy, and Disputes among Players. What is thy Shop, O Jacob! but a Bog-House, fill’d with nothing but Bum-Fodder. […] Bending my Eye downwards, into this subterraneous Cavity, I said to myself, Does Man live for this? Do all his Pursuits tend only to encrease these Stenches, and swell this noisome Profundity? Alas, for nothing else! The Toils and Ambition of the Great, as well as the Labours and Fatigues of the Vulgar, are subservient to this End. For what do we live, but to eat and drink, and exonerate ourselves in these voracious Abysses? The Body of Man is but a Thorough-fare to the common Receptacles of all Things. What an infinite Variety of Creatures is here blended together? Methinks I see, and, Oh! that I could not say, I smell ten Thousand various Dishes, toss’d up together, and jumbled into a second Chaos of Matter.

 

Serious and Cleanly Meditations upon an House-of-Office. Humbly inscribed to the Gold-finders of Great-Britain. By Jeffrey Broadbottom, Esq. [1744]

A place for studious minds

Whatever apologies it might become me to make at any other time for writing to you, I shall use none now, to a man who has owned himself as splenetic as a cat in the country (*). In that circumstance, I know by experience, a letter is a very useful, as well as amusing thing; if you are too busied in state affairs to read it, yet you may find entertainment in folding it into divers figures, either doubling it into a pyramidical, or twisting it into a serpentine form (†): or, if your disposition should not be so mathematical, in taking it with you to that place where men of studious minds are apt to sit longer than ordinary; where, after an abrupt division of the paper, it may not be unpleasant to try to fit and rejoin the broken lines together. All these amusements I am no stranger to in the country, and doubt not but (by this time) you begin to relish them, in your present contemplative situation.

 Alexander Pope to Jonathan Swift, 18 June 1714 

(*) Disgusted at public life in general and the failure of his attempts to reconcile Harley and Bolinbroke in particular, Dr. Swift had left London, retiring to the country house of his friend, the Reverend Gery, at Upper Letcombe in Berkshire, at which place Pope's letter was addressed to him. 

(†) In the Dublin edition of the Pope and Swift correspondence the phrase 'to light a pipe' occurs in inverted commas after 'a serpentine form', but Pope omits it in the quarto of 1741.