Let us be gentle with the denizens of Fame's proud temple, no matter how
they came there. You remember, I suppose, Swift's couplet,--

"Fame has but two gates,--a white and a black one;
The worst they can say is I got in at the back one."

"I have nothing," wrote Pope to his friend Cromwell, "to say to you in
this latter; but I was resolved to write to tell you so. Why should not
I content myself with so many great examples of deep divines, profound
casuists, grave philosophers, who have written, not letters only, but
whole tomes and voluminous treatises about nothing? Why should a fellow
like me, who all his life does nothing, be ashamed to write nothing, and
that, too, to one who has nothing to do but read it?" And so, with "_ex
nihilo nil fit_," he laughingly ends his letter.

And now, while I am at it, I must quote a passage, somewhat germane,
from the very next letter, which Pope wrote to the same friend:--"You
talk of fame and glory, and of the great men of antiquity. Pray, tell
me, what are all your great dead men, but so many living letters? What a
vast reward is here for all the ink wasted by writers and all the blood
spilt by princes! There was in old time one Severus, a Roman Emperor. I
dare say you never called him by any other name in your life; and yet
in his days he was styled Lucius, Septimius, Severus, Pius, Pertinax,
Augustus, Parthicus, Adiabenicus, Arabicus, Maximus, and what not? What
a prodigious waste of letters has time made! What a number have here
dropped off, and left the poor surviving seven unattended! For my own
part, four are all I have to take care of; and I'll be judged by you, if
any man could live in less compass. Well, for the future, I'll drown
all high thoughts in the Lethe of cowslip-wine; as for fame, renown,
reputation, take 'em, critics! If ever I seek for immortality here, may