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his own custody? The task was a difficult one, but he took advantage of a verbal blunder of the Dean's, implying that his own letters as well as Pope's had been in his hands; so that he had some ground for the insinuation that the correspondence had been treacherously obtained by a member of Swift's household. Pope now assumed the attitude of an aggrieved person, and had the amazing effrontery to moralize on the strange incident, so humbling to the pride of human nature, "that the greatest of geniuses, though prudence may have been the companion of wit (which is very rare) for their whole lives past, may have nothing left them at last but their vanity. No decay of body is half so miserable." 'Pope never sank to a lower depth of degradation than when he wrote these words. But if this conduct to a man for whom he professed unbounded affection was his worst act in relation to the publication, it was but one of many in which he took part in order to thrust his correspondence on the world. The curious student may read this long and painful chapter in Pope's biography elsewhere. It is enough to have given here one or two illustrations of the unscrupulous method by which he sought to gain his object. And the end of all this manœuvring was failure. The fame of Pope is not enhanced by the moral effusions and forced sentiments with which his letters abound. It is obvious that nothing in them is spontaneous. There is no ease, no directness of expression, no humour, and none of the charm which brings us, as the letters of Cowper or of Southey do, face to face with the writers. Indeed, there is probably no other series of published letters written by a man of genius so deficient in the qualities which we expect to find

in the intercourse of friend with friend. The letters, which fill five volumes of Messrs. Elwin and Courthope's edition of Pope, are nevertheless of great interest. The poet numbered among his friends the most brilliant intellects of the day, with Swift, an admirable letter writer, at their head; and the student of the period will find much in this correspondence for which he will look in vain elsewhere.

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In this biographical sketch no attempt has been made to enter into all the controversies with which Pope's name is associated. Several doubtful points have been cleared up, not always to his advantage, by recent editors and critics. His life, it has been said, was a succession of petty secrets and third-rate problems." He was a dangerous man to offend, and the sensitive, self-conscious poet was readily offended. The noble lord whom he praised to-day might, like Lord Halifax, be satirized to-morrow, and the woman who had been at one time on the friendliest terms with him, might, like Lady Mary, be afterwards "hitched" into his verse. Of the stories with which his name is associated the Atossa scandal is the worst, and of this therefore a few words must be said. Pope, who did not number avarice among his vices, was charged with having taken a bribe of £1,000 from the Duchess of Marlborough to destroy a satire, and notwithstanding preserving that satire in order that it might be published after his death. We now know, from letters printed in the "Eighth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts," that Pope did receive a sum of money from the Duchess. Writing to her a year before his death, he acknowledges that she had bowed down his pride, "and reduced me

to take that at your hands which I never took at any other," adding, with a comical misappropriation of phrase the famous Duchess being then upwards of eighty—“What a girl you are!" It is therefore clear, although without this acknowledgment it would have been incredible, that a gift of the kind was accepted by Pope, and it is almost equally clear that it was not a mere gift, but that in presenting it the Duchess had a purpose to serve. Mr. Courthope, Pope's latest biographer, whose Life and Notes must be always consulted with deference by students of the poet, asserts indeed that it was a free gift. We should prefer to say that it was not a direct bribe. Mr. Courthope admits that the Duchess "would have naturally sought to propitiate the dreaded satirist by all the means in her power," and thinks it probable she knew "that he had written, though he had not published, the satire upon her husband." She may have received without believing Pope's explanation in attributing the character of Atossa to the Duchess of Buckingham, and in that case, although she could not say so, would have been anxious to prevent its publication. That this was the Duchess of Marlborough's purpose in the gift is, we think, evident, and Pope must have understood her meaning. There was no specific bargain indeed, but Pope allowed himself to be placed under obligations to a woman towards whom, to put his action in the least offensive light, he showed no generosity in return.

In 1732 Atterbury died in exile, and Pope had also to mourn the death of Gay, with whom he had long been on terms of the closest intimacy. Everyone indeed who knew him appears to have loved this easy indolent poet, whom Pope de

scribed as sprinkled with rosewater, and there is sincere grief in the letters in which he tells Swift of his unexpected death. To him, he says, the loss is irreparable. A year later he had another and greater loss to deplore. "I have learnt," said the poet Gray, "that a man can have but one mother." In Pope's tenderness for his, he showed that he had learnt the same lesson, and the poet's friends knew that there was no better way of pleasing him than by showing attention to Mrs. Pope. "It is my mother only," he writes, regretting his confinement at home," that robs me of half the pleasure of my life, and that gives me the greatest at the same time." In his love for her there was the truest human feeling, and in her old age no woman was ever cherished more gently by an affectionate son :

"Me, let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age,

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,

Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,

And keep awhile one parent from the sky!"

Mrs. Pope, who lived to the great age of ninetythree, died in June, 1733. Her son placed a monument to the memory of both parents in Twickenham parish church, and in his grounds he raised an obelisk to his mother with this inscription:

"Ah, Editha! Matrum optima! Mulierum amantissima!

Vale!"

We have said that one of the most brilliant of Pope's poems, the "Prologue to the Satires and Epistles," was addressed to the famous physician, Dr. Arbuthnot, whose fine wit and powerful intellect were combined with a joyous temperament and a sweetness of disposition that made him

universally beloved. "I think Dr. Arbuthnot," said Dr. Johnson, "the first man among the wits of the age," and this seems to have been the impression of his contemporaries. He was a man, Swift said, who could do everything but walk, and Pope called him "as good a doctor as any man for one that is ill, and a better doctor for one that is well." "His imagination," said Lord Chesterfield, "was almost inexhaustible, and his knowledge at everyone's service; charity, benevolence, and a love of mankind appeared unaffectedly in all he said and did." The author of "John Bull," which Macaulay has termed "the most humorous political satire in our language," might have left a great name in literature, but so indifferent was he to fame that it is now difficult to discover what he wrote. His children, we are told, frequently made kites of his scattered papers, which contained hints that "would have furnished good matter for folios." Swift, who

loved the good physician warmly, expressed in verse his regret at being—

"Removed from kind Arbuthnot's aid,

Who knows his art, but not his trade,
Preferring his regard for me

Before his credit or his fee;"

and Pope, who loved to praise his art and care, addressed him as the

"Friend to my life, which did not you prolong,

The world had wanted many an idle song."

Arbuthnot attended Gay in his last illness, and was destined soon to follow him. Hampstead in the last century was famous for the medicinal virtue of its springs, and the physician, who had sent many a patient there, went thither himself in 1734, "so reduced," he writes to Swift, "by a dropsy and an asthma, that I could neither

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