till it is so altered in the next edition. It went by the carrier, directed as you prescribed, this week. Adieu, and may all felicity, mental and corporeal, attend you. I am, dear sir, your faithful and affectionate humble servant.

Perhaps you do not know the various fates of your acquaintance. Sir Harry Blount, who was married and separated from his wife, is now going to live with her again upon her submission, and at her desire.

117.

BROOME TO POPE.

Dec. 1, 1735.

DEAR MR. POPE,-If the value of letters depended upon the punctuality of the return, I should be the most estimable of all your correspondents; but this excellence is no more than that of the post-boy who carries the letter, and usually with punctuality. When I open my breast to you upon paper, it is but opening a toy shop which affords only trifles. I remember a Spanish Governor in the West Indies, with great gravity and solemnity, sent his whisker in pawn to a merchant for many thousands of crowns. It was accepted as sufficient security. If you can be as easily satisfied, you shall not want such pledges.

I do not wonder at your caution in recovering your letters, after the late publication. Yet, after all, some few passages being retracted, where is the mighty grievance? With the good they certainly do you honour, and the worst that the ill-natured can say is what is no dishonour. You have, like our greatest beauties, shown there is such a thing as an excel

menting.

He began the Iliad in 1713, and finished it in 1719. The edition of Shakespeare, which he undertook because he thought nobody else would, took up near two years more in the drudgery of comparing impressions, rectifying the scenery, &c., and the translation of half the Odyssey employed him from that time to 1725." The express purpose of the

original note must have been to call
attention to the sarcasm it professed
to disclaim. If Pope had seriously
intended "to lament that he was em-
ployed in translation at all," it was
obvious that he would not have
ignored the six years passed in trans-
lating the Iliad, and confined his
lamentation to the
"three years
passed in translating with Broome."

lence in trifling agreeably. It is a Lælius or a Scipio playing with pebbles, and, in my opinion, the humane companion, the dutiful and affectionate son, the compassionate and obliging friend, appear so strongly almost in every page, that I assure you I had rather be the owner of the writer's heart than of the head that has honoured England with Homer, his Essays, Moral Epistles, &c. These gain you honour with men, the other with heaven and angels.

I thank you for the obliging alteration intended in your poem. If I were of your church, I should say it was a kind of releasement from purgatory and from the company of condemned reprobate poets and authors.

I have a desire to reprint my Miscellany, not out of any degree of vanity, but merely to give them a more solemn interment, and to bury my dead in a more decent monument. But Mr. Lintot lays me under difficulties. He expects me to print them at my own expense, and then he would be the vendor. If you can bring him to reason, I will thank you for the obligation.' I desire no lucrative favours from him, but solely an opportunity of correcting my negligences.

I have taken the liberty to send you a poem on Death. It has long laid by me. I beg you to read it with your usual patience. I know there are some things common in it, but no wonder when it is wrote on the commonest of all subjects, Death. I flatter myself that where I coincide with the sentiments of others I have done it at least equally poetically.

I hope once more to see you and Twickenham. I would not come to London for Lambeth, but a friend shall always command me. I have long given over all worldly aims. I protest knowing myself a mortal, I am ashamed, even in thought, to wish for any more earthly accessions; and for this best of reasons, because I know there is an immortality. But I will not preach; I will only pray that all happiness may attend here and hereafter. I am ever yours.

you

1 The unreasonable person was Broome. He candidly admitted that his verses were defunct, and that his only motive for republishing them was "to bury his dead in a more

decent monument." The book was to be printed, without the prospect of a return, for his single gratification, and what pretext could there be for asking Lintot to be at the loss?

118.

POPE TO BROOME,

Jan. 12, [1736].

DEAR SIR, -You may wonder at my long omission to answer yours, though indeed I am grown a very unpunctual correspondent to all my friends, and have wholly desisted from corresponding in general but upon absolute necessity, after so severe an experiment, how much more dangerous it is to me than to any other honest' man to tell his private thoughts to his friends. I could not propose to Lintot what you desired all this while, he having been in the country and ill of an asthma, but I will in a short time. Though I have had no correspondence or conference with him these ten years, yet, in your cause, I will try; but I fear I can have no influence with him. I may truly say I approve greatly your verses on Death, and doubt not I shall do the same of your other corrections.

I had also a mind not to write to you till I could perform my promise of altering the line in the Dunciad. I have prevailed with much ado to cancel an impression of a thousand leaves to insert that alteration, which I have seen done, and I will in a week send you the small edition of my works, where you will find it done, by your carrier, when I find the direction whither to direct the books, which I have mislaid. In the meantime, I enclose the leaf. You will observe I have omitted the note as well as the verse, and again told them I translated but half the Odyssey."

Pray, if you find any letters of mine, send them. The sooner I had them the better for the design I mentioned to you. In a word, dear Broome, be assured I love you; and having overleaped the vacancy of our friendship, am as truly as ever yours.

1 The dishonest were not more liable than the honest to have their letters stolen, and Pope's epithet has here no proper force. But he could seldom approach his frauds without introducing his honesty, and he exemplified South's remark, "When a man talks of his honesty look to your pockets."

2 He never formally retracted the false account in the Postscript to the Odyssey, and Ruff head, who had the benefit of Warburton's information, continued to believe in 1769 that Broome's individual share in the translation had been correctly told in the final note.

119.

POPE TO BROOME

TWITENHAM, March 25, 1736.

DEAR SIR, I have been a good while a little surprised, and somewhat in pain, at not having heard from you, after I had sent you what I thought you could not but take kindly, a sacrifice of that leaf in a whole edition of the Dunciad, which alone you could be displeased with. I had discharged at the same time your commission to Lintot, but you know, I suppose, he died the next week after he came to town. I had also expressed my desire to you to enter some fresh memorial of the revival of our old friendship in inserting a letter or two into my collection out of those which you may have chanced to keep of mine, and which you told me you would send up to that end. I hope you received my two volumes octavo2 before the first of which I caused your kind verses to me to be placed, with the rest of those I esteemed. I directed them all to Mr. Smith, as you ordered, by the carrier from the Saracen's Head, near two months ago. I chiefly fear you may be ill, for I truly wish you health and long life, and shall upon all occasions be glad to show you my disposition is friendly to all mankind, and sorry at any time, whether through mistakes

1 Pope, Nov. 18, 1735, endeavoured to prevail upon Broome to return his letters, and Broome in his answer, Dec. 1, evaded the subject. The request was renewed by Pope on Jan. 12, 1736, in a more enticing form. In his first application he said, "None, I promise you, should ever see the light, unless I should find one or two not very contemptible which might show the world my regard for you;" but in the second application the uncertain and incidental use became the primary purpose, and Pope said, "The sooner I had them, the better for the design I mentioned to you." This was an appeal to Broome's cherished aspiration, and he yielded some description of assent. As usually

happened, Pope and Broome had different objects. Pope wanted to get back his letters, and the commemoration of their friendship was the lure he held out; Broome desired to have the friendship commemorated, and was unwilling to part with the letters. I suspect that his promise to send them meant that he would send the one or two specimens which were to be published, and Pope's third application to Broome did not speed better than the first and second. The opposition in their aims brought the negotiation to nothing. Broome did not give up the letters; and Pope did not commemorate the friendship.

2 The first and second volume of the new edition of his works.

or too tender resentments, or too warm passions-which are often nearer akin than undiscerning people imagine—to have wounded another. I beg to hear from you, and am sincerely

yours.

120.1

BROOME TO PITT.

March 24, 1741-2.

DEAR MR. PITT,-Methinks I hear you, upon opening this enormous letter, crying out with Eneas to the Sybil in Virgil,

that is,

Foliis tantum ne carmina manda;

Let my friend write, cries Pitt, but briefly write,
And not in folio, folios must affright.

You will find, sir, that I shall pay a due deference to your candour and judgment whenever I have an opportunity of reprinting my verses. It is certain that the best authors are the most favourable, as they certainly are the best judges. A Midas will condemn even Apollo. I speak not ambitiously, for perhaps it would be for my advantage if every reader were a Midas, but I do not wish that all the world should be mistaken for my reputation. I have done as well as I can,-I believe, just

1 This letter to Christopher Pitt, the translator of Vida's Art of Poetry, and the Eneid, is inserted as the final indication we possess of Broome's feelings to Pope, which, after the alternations of resentment and empty truces, reverted to the admiration and good-will of early years.

2 Broome had presented Pitt with the last edition of his poems, and on the 21st of January, 1742, wrote to invite his criticisms. "I have made some alterations, which I will in due time send to you, and I now beg you to communicate any objections that occur to you in that volume. I fear my labour is thrown away, and that I am only polishing a pebble. speak my real fears. If I thought

I

my poetry truly good I would use no disguise.' Pitt replied on the 20th of February, "that it was a very difficult task to discover any blemish or even the shadow of a fault," but suggested two or three slight alterations, and it is to these that Broome alludes. "I do not," Pitt said in conclusion, "propose these things as faulty, but, since you put me upon impossibilities, to obey you I was resolved to show this instance of my zeal without knowledge." The inscription on Pitt's monument records that he was "very eminent for the universal candour of his mind," which was his vice in the sense then attached to "candour," and his want in the present meaning of the word.