Pope, Alexander

commiserating at Bathurst's retirement from society, complaining of his own declining health (“...if I pass 2 days abroad 'tis odds, but one of them I must be a trouble to any goodnatur'd friend & to his family; and the other, remain dispirited enough to make 'em no sort of amends by my languid conversation...”) and expressing his desire to “turn myself back again into myself, & apply to study” in order to write works that will recompense his friends, including Bathust, for their trouble over him (“...I ought not to go to my grave without trying at least to give them an hour or two's pleasure...”), concluding with hopes that they will soon meet, 3 pages, 4to, n.p., 18 December [1730?], neat repairs at folds to both leaves with very slight loss of text, remains of edge mount

The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn (1956), vol. III, pp.156-157

“...let me tell you my Life in Thought and Imagination is as much superior to my Life in action & reality as the best soul can be to the vilest body...”

A CHARACTERISTICALLY ELEGANT LETTER IN WHICH POPE CONTRASTS HIS PHYSICAL DECREPITUDE WITH HIS UNDIMMED LITERARY AMBITIONS. Pope was famously a writer who gained a new independence from wealthy benefactors through his astute understanding of the world of publishing, but this letter reflects a much more traditional understanding of poems as gifts amongst friends rather than publications for an anonymous readership: his poems will repay generosity, entertaining friends who have entertained him. When he writes of his proclaimed desire to “show you some day, that I made it one of my first vanities, to be thought your friend, not only while I lived, but when I am gone”, he undoubtedly means that he hopes to dedicate a work to his aristocratic friend as a further gesture of friendship.

Allen, first Lord Bathurst (1684-1775) was a Tory peer who cultivated the company of literary figures throughout his long life, from Congreve and Swift, to Sterne and Edmund Burke. Pope often visited Bathurst at his Cirencester estate and addressed him in the third of his Moral Essays, on the use of wealth.