There is a thing, the only thing which kings and queens cannot give you, for they have it not to give--liberty, which is worth all they have, and which as yet Englishmen need not ask from their hands.

You will enjoy that, and your own integrity, and the satisfactory consciousness of having not merited such graces from Courts as are bestowed only on the mean, servile, flattering, interested and undeserving.

The only steps to the favour of the great are such complacencies, such compliances, such distant decorums, as delude them in their vanities, or engage them in their passions.

He is their greatest favourite who is the falsest; and when a man, by such vile graduations arrives at the height of grandeur and power, he is then at best but in a circumstance to be hated, and in a condition to be hanged for serving their ends.

So many a Minister has found it." "I can only add a plain uncourtly speech," Pope wrote again to Gay ten days later.