It is a little cool indeed for this time of

year, but

then, my dear, you will allow it has an extreme clean, pretty look.

Ay, so has my muflin apron; but I would no chufe to make it a winter fuit of cloaths.

Well now I'll fwear, child, you have put me in mind of a very pretty. drefs; let me die if I don't think a muflin flounce, made very full, would give one a very agreeable Flirtation-air.

Well, I fwear it would be charming! and I should like it of all things-Do you think there are any fuch things as Spirits?

Do you believe there is any fuch place as the Elyfian Fields; O Gad, that would be charming! I wish I were to go to the Elyfian fields when I die, and then I fhould not care if I were to leave the world to-morrow but is one to meet there with what one has loved moft in this world?

Now you muft tell me this pofitively. To be fure you can, or what do I correfpond with you for, if you will not tell me all? you know I abominate Referve.

LETTER VII. *

Bath, 1714.

γου

ou are to understand, Madam, that my passion for your fair felf and your fifter, has been divided with the most wonderful regularity in the world. Even from my infancy I have been in love with one after the other of you, week by week, and my journey to Bath fell out in the three hundred feventy-fixth week of the reign of my fovereign Lady Sylvia. At the prefent writing hereof it is the three hundred eighty-ninth week of the reign of your most ferene majefty, in whofe fervice I was lifted fome weeks before I beheld your fifter. This information will account for my writing to either of you hereafter, as either fhall happen to be queen-regent at that time.

Pray tell your fifter, all the good qualities and virtuous inclinations fhe has, never gave me fo much pleasure in her conversation, as that one vice of her obftinacy will give me mortification this month. Ratcliffe commands her to the Bath, and she refuses! indeed if I were in Berkshire I fhould honour her for this obftinacy, and magnify her no lefs for difobedience than we do the Barcelonians. But people change with the change of places (as we fee of late)

and

* To Terefa Blount. Pope's tenderness of Paffion feems here to be wavering between the two fifters; it was afterwards entirely fixed on Martha, and continued to his death.

in the Collection of Michael Blount. Esq. at Maple Durham.

Published by Cadell & Davies, Strand, and the other Proprietors, May 1.1807.

and virtues become vices when they ceafe to be for one's intereft, with me, as with others.

;

Yet let me tell her, fhe will never look fo finely while fhe is upon earth, as fhe would here in the water. It is not here as in most other inftances, for those ladies that would please extremely, must go out of their own element. She does not make half fo good a figure on horseback as Christina Queen of Sweden but were the once seen in the Bath, no man would part with her for the best mermaid in Christendom. You know I have feen you often, I perfectly know * how you look in black and in white, I have experienced the utmost you can do in colours; but all your movements, all your graceful steps, deserve not half the glory you might here attain, of a moving and eafy behaviour in buckram: fomething between fwimming and walking, free enough, and more modestlyhalf-naked than you can appear any where else. You have conquered enough already by land? fhow your ambition, and vanquish alfo by water. The buckram I mention is a dress peculiarly useful at this time, when, we are told, they are bringing over the fafhion of German ruffs you ought to use yourself to fome degrees

* Such is the fuperior decency and propriety of public manners, that the ftrange circumftance of Ladies appearing in the Bath, pro bono publico, feems, at this time, fcarcely credible. Thefe very Letters may further tend to prove the great fuperiority of the prefent period, in this refpect.