28 August 2024
A place for studious minds (2)
27 August 2024
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.