ranean grotto, which he has furnished with looking-glasses, and they tell me it has a very good effect. I here send you some verses addressed to Mr. Gay, who wrote him a congratulatory letter on the finishing his house. I stifled them here, and I beg they may die the same death in Paris, and never go farther than closet":

your

"Ah, friend, 'tis true-this truth you lovers know-
In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow;
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens ;
Joy lives not here, to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes.

What are the gay parterre, the chequered shade,
The morning bower, the evening colonnade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,

To sigh unheard in to the passing winds?

So the struck deer in some sequestered part

Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;

There stretched unseen in coverts hid from day,
Bleeds drop by drop and pants his life away."

It was evidently time that the intercourse between Lady Mary and her admirer should cease. Pope deserved his punishment, but he felt the shame of it acutely, and it embittered his life. His irritability and self-consciousness, his eagerness for fame and his excessive sensibility, led him again and again into devious paths. The attacks which he too often provoked were returned by every garret-author in Grub Street, and Pope found his chief consolation in carrying on the combat with keener weapons than his foes. Although he affected to find his diversion in these attacks, he had not the magnanimity to despise them :

"Peace is my dear delight, not Fleury's more,
But touch me and no minister's so sore,
Whoe'er offends at some unlucky time
Slides into verse and hitches in a rhyme."

To follow Pope's quarrels in this brief sketch of his life is impossible, and they must be read at large in the narratives of his biographers. Some

of the most notable were wholly without justification, and in others the poet's resentment was out of all proportion to the provocation he received. Yet such is the exquisite skill of the artist that he forces us to read with pleasure what at the same time we feel to be morally indefensible. Pope maintained that satire was useless if not personal. To attack vices in the abstract, he said, "without touching persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows," and it must be remembered that to this view of his craft we are indebted for the "Dunciad," which Mr. Ruskin, with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than judgment, has styled "the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work exacted' in our country."

The success of the "Iliad" encouraged Pope to proceed with the "Odyssey," and in this labour he was considerably assisted by two Cambridge men, Broome and Fenton. The story of this partnership is creditable neither to Pope nor to Broome. Pope translated twelve books, Broome eight, and Fenton four, but Pope induced Broome to ascribe only three books to himself, and two to Fenton, and to state, without consulting his colleague, their mutual satisfaction “in Mr. Pope's acceptance of our best endeavours." At the same time, in proof of his liberality as a paymaster, Pope stated the amount he had paid for the eight books as though it had been paid for three. could, as he once said, "equivocate pretty genteelly,” but Broome, having set his name to a falsehood, had no right to complain; and Fenton's laziness or indifference prevented him from publicly exposing the lie. For the moment he was considerably annoyed, and wrote to Broome, saying, "I had always so ill an opinion of your

He

postscribing to the "Odyssey" that I was not surprised with anything in it but the mention of my own name, which heartily vexes me, and is, I think, a license that deserves a worse epithet than I have it in my nature to give it." After this transaction Fenton does not appear to have corresponded with Pope, and he died four years later. The poet praised him after his death, and wrote his epitaph. For Broome another distinction was reserved. Pope sneered at him in the “Dunciad,” and “laughed unmercifully" at his poetry in the "Treatise on the Bathos." Strange to say, the general quality of the verse by Broome and Fenton in the "Odyssey," as Dr. Johnson has pointed out, is so much on a level with Pope's, that it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish between them. The first three books of the " Odyssey" were published in April, 1725. A month earlier Pope's edition of "Shakespeare" had appeared in six quarto volumes, an edition chiefly notable for the Preface, his best piece of work in prose.

In the summer of 1726, Dean Swift came over to England, after an absence of twelve years, and stayed for many weeks with Pope at Twickenham. "I have lived these two months past," he wrote to Tickell in July, "for the most part in the country, either at Twickenham with Mr. Pope or rambling with him and Mr. Gay for a fortnight together. Yesterday my Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Congreve made up five at dinner at Twickenham." Pope's nature was not sordid; he gave away an eighth part of his income in charity, but as a host he was neither genial nor hospitable. "You have not forgot," Swift writes to Gay, "Gentlemen, I will leave you to your wine,' which was but the remainder of a pint when four glasses

were drunk. I tell that story to everybody, in commendation of Mr. Pope's abstemiousness." If this story were worth telling, Swift was not the man to tell it, for he was never a liberal host himself, and in his later years, when a friend came to him in expectation of a dinner, he was in the habit of giving him a shilling instead. Yet Swift could be nobly generous. He gave away a third of his income in charity, and put by another third in order to build a hospital for lunatics after his decease. Swift's visit was a memorable one, for he brought with him the MS. of "Gulliver's Travels," which he said he x wrote "to vex the world rather than to divert it." The book was published before the close of the year. During this visit the two great wits resolved to publish a Miscellany of their writings in prose and verse, and Arbuthnot was a partner in the enterprise. Among the contributions brought forward by Pope was a rough draft of the Dunciad," and Swift urged him to carry out the plan. The way in which he did carry it out is far from creditable to the poet. To a "Treatise on the Bathos," which he had written for the Miscellany, he added a chapter "devoted to the baldest personality, consisting of a comparison of a number of living authors, whose identity could be easily recognized by their initials, to Flying Fishes, Swallows, Ostriches, Parrots, Didappers, Porpoises, Frogs, Eels, and Tortoises. This device answered its purpose perfectly. The enraged authors rushed into print, and, as Savage says in his History, for half a year or more the common newspapers were filled with the most abusive falsehoods and scurrilities they could possibly devise."" 1

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1 Courthope's "Life of Pope," p. 214.

Pope had now the opportunity which he wanted. In May, 1728, the "Dunciad" appeared, and was read with avidity by a public eager for the scandal that gave venom to its every page. A little later an enlarged edition was published, full of the mystifications in which Pope delighted. If we could imagine the first poet of our day attacking with all the force of his genius, and with a total disregard of truth and delicacy, every insignificant writer that may have criticised him unfavourably, and out of pure spite placing also in his poetical pillory men of high reputation, and flinging dirt at them with the energy of a scavenger—we might perhaps understand the excitement caused by the publication of the “Dun- \ ciad." Pope was beyond question the greatest poet of his age; he had "no brother near the throne," and the comparative narrowness of the world of letters made his greatness the more conspicuous. It was a coarse age, and it is but just to remember that he had suffered deeply from the taunts of his opponents. By the publication of this amazing satire, however, his enemies were multiplied tenfold. So irritated was the poet by the abuse that followed the success of the Dunciad," that, with the help of two friends, he started the "Grub Street Journal," and once more" slew the slain" in its columns. The cruel blows thus inflicted in verse and prose made him in danger of personal assault, and when Pope went abroad, he carried a brace of pistols, and was accompanied by a large dog. He said he would. not go a step out of his way for such villains. The "Journal" existed for seven years, and Pope's next publication (in 1742) was the "New or Greater Dunciad," now known as the "Fourth Book," in which, a year later, the

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