for the spacious mansion, like a Turkish caravansera, entertains the vagabonds with bare lodgings. I rule the family very ill, keep bad hours, and lend out your pictures about the town. See what it is to have a poet in your house. Frank, indeed, does all he can in such circumstances; for, considering he has a wild beast in it, he constantly keeps the door chained: every time it is opened the links rattle, the rusty hinges roar. The house seems so sensible that you are all its support, that it is ready to drop in your absence; but I still trust myself under its roof, as depending that Providence will preserve so many Raphaels, Titians, and Guidos as are lodged in your cabinet. Surely the sins of one poet can hardly be so heavy as to bring an old house over the heads of so many painters. In a word, your house is falling; but what of that? I am only a lodger!" This was mere pleasant badinage. During Jervas's absence, Pope made a journey on horseback to Oxford, a place he was fond of visiting; and his account of his journey, and mode of passing his time there, given in a letter to Martha Blount, is a pleasant near peep into his life. "Nothing could have more of that melancholy which once used to please me than my last day's journey; for, after having passed through my favorite woods in the forest, with a thousand reveries of past pleasures, I rode over hanging hills, whose tops were edged with groves, and whose feet watered with winding rivers, listening to the falls of cataracts below, and the murmuring of the winds above. The gloomy verdure of Stonor succeeded to these, and then the shades of the evening overtook me: the moon rose in the clearest sky I ever saw, by whose solemn light I passed on slowly without company, or any interruption to the range of my thoughts. About a mile before I reached Oxford, all the bells rang out in different notes; the clocks of every college answered one another, and sounded forth, some in deeper, some in softer tones, that it was eleven at night. All this was no ill preparation to the life I have since led among these old walls, memorable galleries, stone porticoes, students' walks, and solitary scenes of the University. I wanted nothing but a black gown and a salary to be as mere a book-worm as any there. I conformed myself to college hours, was rolled up in books, lay in the most dusky parts of the University, and was as dead to the world as any hermit of the desert. If any thing was alive or awake in me, it was a little vanity, such as even those good men used to entertain when the monks of their own order extolled their piety and abstraction; for I found myself received with a sort of respect which the idle part of mankind, the learned, pay to their own species; who are as considerable here as the busy, the gay, and the ambitious are in your world. Indeed, I was treated in such a manner, that I could not but sometimes ask myself, in my mind, what college I was founder of, or what library I had built.