approaching, when nothing but the society of old friends could cheer the decline of health and spirits, until even affections such as these should lose their power. The last months of Pope's life were passed chiefly in the society of Warburton, though he was still occasionally able to visit his older friends, Lords Bolingbroke and Marchmont, at Battersea: while Martha Blount, towards whom his affection remained unabated, solaced him by her occasional presence in his own home. At last came that sense of the insufficiency of all human affections which to all except vulgar minds heralds the near approach of death. Pope died after an open and free acknowledgment of the faith from the profession of which he had never swerved, and in a calm tranquillity offering a consoling contrast to the turbulence of his intellectual life. The date of his death was the 30th of May, 1744. He was buried, according to the directions of his will, in Twickenham church, near the monument which his filial piety had erected to his parents. He desired no inscription on his tomb; but the officious devotion of Warburton, seventeen years later, placarded a tasteless monument with an epigram written by Pope himself, but never, we may be sure, designed by him to degrade his resting-place1.

His will is only interesting in so far as ample provision was made in it for Martha Blount, to whom the principal part of the poet's property was bequeathed for her life. To his literary friends he made many bequests of books and statues. The legacy to Warburton has been already mentioned; but as literary executor he named Lord Bolingbroke, or (in case he should not survive the testator,) Lord Marchmont. To Bolingbroke's hands were to be committed all MS. and unprinted papers; and thus it came to pass that even after his death Pope's name and fame were involved in two of those literary imbroglios to which he had too frequently exposed them in his lifetime.

Bolingbroke made the discovery that shortly before his death Pope had caused to be printed off, in readiness for publication in his Epistle on the Characters of Women, that satiric sketch of the Duchess of Marlborough, under the name of Atossa, which he had formerly been induced to suppress. It has already been stated that there is too little room for doubt that Pope, in order to secure an independence for Martha Blount, had accepted from the Duchess the sum of 1000; but the extent of the undertaking which he had made in return must ever remain unknown. The existence both of the problem and of the certainty, casts an unwelcome shadow on Pope's character. Another grievance, which stung Bolingbroke to allow the bitterest reproaches to be uttered in writing, and virtually in his name, against Pope, was intrinsically of less moment. It concerned the unwarranted printing by Pope's directions, five years before his death, of Bolingbroke's Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, on the Idea of a Patriot King, and on the State of Parties, with alterations in the arrangement and omissions never sanctioned by their author. Pope seems in this instance to have been guilty of an inexcusable offence against his

See the Epitaph, No. xv.

friend; but as, the letters being kept private, no evil result had followed, Bolingbroke would have shown no more than ordinary generosity in remaining silent as to the practically harmless affront. But there was no generosity in his nature, and instead of contenting himself with burning the offensive copies, he ordered his editor, Mallet, to revile Pope for his breach of trust in terms which reflect even less credit upon the offended than upon the offender.

'There is nothing easier,' it has been remarked by the most generous, as he is the most refined, of living critics', 'than to make a caricature of Pope.' Hogarth and his public contemporaries never lighted upon a more facile task; and it needs no genius for description to reproduce with telling elaboration the familiar outlines. But little is gained by intermingling personalities from which Dennis might have shrunk with an estimate of intellectual characteristics; and a very few facts suffice to change into infinite pity the curiosity with which his bodily and mental sufferings have been exhibited, like the contortions of a marionette.

From the day of his birth Pope was weak and sickly in body; and the extreme sensibility of his nerves, the feebleness of his digestive organs, and the general fragility of his constitution, made his life, in Dr Johnson's phrase, a long disease. In boyhood he nearly sank under the influence of an uncontrollable hypochondria; such indulgences of town life as he afterwards permitted himself had speedily to be relinquished; in middle age he was dependent for ordinary comfort on the constant care of women. He was bald and deformed and almost a dwarf; his wearingapparel had to be stiffened here and padded there; and his bodily wants were in consequence those of a child, and his habits those of a valetudinarian. If his treatment of his maladies was sometimes petulant and sometimes unwise, his friends might have spared posterity their anecdotes of these inevitable failings; nor need Dr Johnson, of all men, have gravely recorded the fact that Pope 'loved too well to eat.'

'It might well be expected,' observes a brilliant critic, whose cruelty in dwelling upon Pope's physical infirmities has rarely been surpassed, that such a man would be 'capricious and susceptible.' Upon Pope's sensitive nature every spoken or written word, and every event in which he was interested, operated with thrilling effect. Martha Blount often saw him weep, in reading very tender and melancholy passages; he told Spence that he could never peruse Priam's lament for Hector without tears. This would not have astonished the generation of Sterne and Mackenzie; but Pope's age was not given to sensibility. On the other hand, Pope had, like a child, no judgment of the relative importance of injuries; his anger was uncontrollable, and with the passionate petulance of childhood he combined the resentfulness of a mind unable to forgive till it forgets. In his vanity I see nothing superlative. For him, wholly wrapped up in the progress of his literary career,

1 M. Ste. Beuve, in his Nouveaux Lundis (T. viii.).

2 M. Taine.

every incident apparently advancing or retarding its progress, assumed an exceptional importance; and in order to keep himself before the public he frequently condescended to doubtful stratagems. But it was restlessness rather than a false estimate of his own value which prompted him to these steps. He never exalted himself above those whom his literary consciousness had taught him to venerate. He never courted the great for other than an equal friendship, or sought favours which he was unable to return.

He has been frequently charged with an inordinate love of money; a supposed weakness on which Lady Mary, in the days of her enmity with Pope, was especially glad to descant. Johnson noted his extreme talkativeness on this subject; but there is little in his actual proceedings to warrant the main accusation. Swift (who resigned to Pope the profits of their Miscellanies) would not have objected to be paid in place for the services for which he scornfully spurned any other return. But Pope was a literary man—a name which Swift would have despised-and on his literary earnings built up his literary independence. His parsimony in small matters savours rather of a habit than a vice; nor is there reason to disbelieve his statement that of his modest income he expended one-eighth in alms.

In compensation for his bodily infirmities, nature had bestowed upon him a brilliant eye and a melodious voice. To counteract the debilitating effects of his miserable health, he had been gifted with an indefatigable activity of mind, aided by an extraordinary memory. But he also possessed an affectionate heart, to whose promptings he listened in all the dearest relations of life. He was the best of sons to both his parents, a kind brother, and to those who had once engaged his affections, a faithful and devoted friend. No suspicion perverted the attachment which united him to the associates of his youth, to the Carylls and Cromwells and Blounts, and to the friends of his manhood, to Swift and Arbuthnot and Gay, and to Bolingbroke, whom he thought' superior to anything he had seen in human nature.' Nor was he a friend in sunshine only; the exile of many was cheered by his sympathy; and Swift predicted that among all his friends Pope would grieve longest for his death. His relations to women were those of tender friendship or affected gallantry, but they exercised no momentous influence upon his life. Had he not occasionally allowed his pen to pander to the profligacy of the age, we might regard with unmixed pity the fate which condemned him to an unmarried life. Lastly, a true generosity of spirit held him fast to his father's faith; and as he became the tool of no political faction, so he permitted no arguments of self-interest to weigh against the dictates of an unaffected piety.

Yet there remains the fact that Pope's real life lay in his literary labours. He quitted them indeed from time to time, but they never quitted him. His social gifts were small; and in conversation he never shone1. 'As much company as I have

On this point Spence's Anecdotes must remain the chief evidence. It is true that Pope's con

versation could have gained nothing in Spence's hands, whose note-book is without a spark of dra

kept, and as much as I love it, I love reading better. I would rather be employed in reading than in the most agreeable conversation.' From reading he passed to writing, without the interval of experience of the world which might have saved him many false steps and many empty griefs. But nothing that arose out of the circumstances of his literary life was empty to him. As a boy he had determined to devote himself to literature. Neither the cruel law which deprived him of the opportunity of a regular education, nor the weakness of his health, nor the knowledge that his success must depend upon himself alone, could stop his prosecution of this resolve. He had faith in himself; and this faith, justified by his achievements, stamps him a great man. No self-delusion diverted him from the path which he had chosen. Brought up under the influences of a narrow taste, and in an age when literature was used rather than honoured, he devoted himself to her service as an end, and not as a mean. His age welcomed him as one of its children; but by what he achieved in and for the national literature his true fame must endure.

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The time has gone by for Pope to be ranked among the master-geniuses of our literature. In the last of his uncompromising devotees, Lord Byron, we already recognise the note of half-conscious exaggeration usual in the defenders of a no longer tenable cause. "Neither time, nor distance, nor age," writes Lord Byron in 1821, can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all "times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain to it) "he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the book of life. Without canting and yet without neglecting religion, he has assembled all that a good and great man can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in consummate beauty. "Sir Wm. Temple observes, 'That of all the members of mankind that live within "the compass of a thousand years, for one man that is capable of making a great 'poet, there may be a thousand born capable of making as great generals or minis"ters of state as any in story.' Here is a statesman's opinion of poetry; it is "honourable to him and to the art. Such a 'poet of a thousand years' was Pope. "A thousand years will roll away before such another can be hoped for in our "literature. But it can want them. He is himself a literature."

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Such an avalanche of enthusiasm in Lord Byron can sometimes be traced to provocation; and the cause of the above extravagant burst was the edition of Pope by Bowles, which had for the first time brought under active debate Pope's claims to a place among the greatest names of English literature. For Johnson had cavilled rather than protested; and Warton's doubts had, in the opinion of the public, met with a satisfactory reply. Bowles's edition is not without its faults, it is indeed not

matic vitality. (Joseph Spence first became acquainted with Pope in 1725, by publishing a criticism on the translation of the Odyssey. After

wards, through the influence of Pope's friends, he was appointed a prebend of Durham and Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford.)

without its vices; for it displays an animus against Pope which makes the editor unfair in his judgment of biographical details, as well as ungenerous in the picture which he draws of his author as a man. Yet Bowles has been justly termed the most poetical editor of Pope; and it was he who, under the influences of a new current in English literature with which Byron had more in common than he cared to know, first succeeded in establishing those defects in his author which no candid criticism can since pretend to overlook.

Pope is the foremost of our classical poets, if the term be correctly applied to a school which sought in the masterpieces of ancient times the starting-point of their own literary developement. But a national literature cannot engraft itself upon a foreign trunk; and England already possessed a national literature. Moreover, the classical taste which prevailed in Pope's youth was not the result of another Renaissance, of another movement towards intellectual freedom through genuine culture. English society and its handmaid, English literature, had in the days of the Restoration, recklessly seized upon what seemed most attractive in the social and literary activity of our nearest and most influential neighbours-the French. Foreign literary models had thus been thoughtlessly adopted by our own writers, and by one great genius, Dryden, amongst their number. French classicism, a bastard birth, had been transplanted to our soil, and though it could not be acclimatised without undergoing many modifications in accordance with our national peculiarity, yet it remained an exotic and unnatural growth. Already Dryden, when in the hot haste of his literary life his better genius had found time to take counsel with itself, had recognised the truth that the French classical school was merely a French adaptation of classical rules-and supposed classical rules-into a code which was French rather than classical. He had turned from the French to the ancients themselves, but he could not shake off the influence to which he had allowed himself to be subjected. Pope was less immediately under the influence of French models than Dryden; but, on the other hand, the influence of the latter exerted itself in its turn upon his successor. Hence it was impossible that Pope should approach such a classic as Homer with the freshness of original appreciation; and hence, in his own original poetry, he naturally formed his taste among the moderns, upon those in whom he found the so-called classical element in predominance, and among the ancients in those most capable of assimilation to the conception of classical poetry which the age of his predecessors had derived at second-hand. But the models which he consistently followed were recommended to him by more than an ordinary acceptance of the prevailing canons of taste. He was even as a boy too quick-witted not to perceive many of the characteristic features of such writers as Chaucer and Spenser; yet we seek in vain for any influence of these upon the writings either of his youth or of his maturity. He thought Statius the best of all the Latin poets after Vergil; and perhaps even the exception of the latter was merely conventional. Among the Italians he preferred Tasso to Ariosto; and the preference is equally significant.