But their
writing was the entertainment of their pleasure; yours is only a
diversion of your pain. The muses have seldom employed your thoughts,
but when some violent fit of the gout has snatched you from affairs
of state; and, like the priestess of Apollo, you never come to deliver
his oracles, but unwillingly, and in torment. So that we are obliged
to your lordship's misery for our delight: You treat us with the cruel
pleasure of a Turkish triumph, where those, who cut and wound their
bodies, sing songs of victory as they pass, and divert others with
their own sufferings. Other men endure their diseases; your lordship
only can enjoy them. Plotting and writing in this kind are certainly
more troublesome employments than many which signify more, and are of
greater moment in the world: The fancy, memory, and judgment, are then
extended (like so many limbs) upon the rack; all of them reaching
with their utmost stress at nature; a thing so almost infinite and
boundless, as can never fully be comprehended, but where the images of
all things are always present. Yet I wonder not your lordship succeeds
so well in this attempt; the knowledge of men is your daily practice
in the world; to work and bend their stubborn minds, which go not all
after the same grain, but each of them so particular a way, that
the same common humours, in several persons, must be wrought upon by
several means.
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