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He died in the

sleep, breathe, eat, nor move." following spring. Pope and I were with him," writes Lord Chesterfield, "the evening before he died, when he suffered racking pains from an inflammation in his bowels, but his head was clear to the last. He took leave of us with tenderness, without weakness, and told us that he died not only with the comfort, but even the devout assurance of a Christian."

Later in the same year, Lord Peterborough sent for Pope to bid him farewell before he left England for Lisbon, a dying man. "Poor Lord Peterborough," Pope wrote to Swift, upon hearing of his death at sea, "there is another string lost that would have helped to draw you hither! He ordered on his deathbed his watch to be given me (that which had accompanied him in all his travels), with the reason, that I might have something to put me every day in mind of him.' It is evident that Pope with all his faults knew how to win friends, and to keep them. If in his verse he gave an unenviable notoriety to his foes, he conferred on those whom he loved a poetical immortality. Two of the most prominent of his later associates were Warburton and Spence. As a young man, Warburton, whose ambition was greater than his taste or learning, tried to gain reputation by depreciating the genius of Pope; later on, he used all his art to gain the poet's friendship, and a commentary in defence of the

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Essay on Man" was sufficient to secure it. The divine was not blessed with high principle, and the poet found the want of it convenient. A man of strong energy and self-confidence, Pope submitted to his guidance. He did Warburton also essential service by introducing him to his friends. One of these was Murray, after

wards Lord Mansfield, through whom he was appointed preacher at Lincoln's Inn ; another was Allen, who " did good by stealth, and blushed to find it fame," and by this acquaintance Warburton gained the hand of his niece, a wealthy heiress, and also, through an introduction to Pitt, the bishopric of Gloucester.

Spence, who afterwards became Professor of Poetry in Oxford, was a man of a better stamp. A gentleman in feeling, and a devout admirer of Pope, his homage was sincere, and his criticism, which was for the most part admiration, proved highly grateful to the poet. Spence had the instinct of Boswell, without his ability, and all students of the poet and of his age will be grateful for his "Anecdotes."

The uneasy course of Pope's life was now drawing to a close, and it is interesting to know that he laboured to the last in the art he loved so well. He was arranging a new edition of his works just before his death, and sent copies of the "Moral Epistles" to his friends. "Here I am like Socrates," he said to Spence, "dispensing my morality among my friends, just as I am dying." Like Addison and Arbuthnot, he was asthmatical, and also suffered from dropsy. No remedies were of any avail, and throughout the whole of March (1744) he was unable to leave the room. As a last resource, Pope consulted a quack, who professed to see signs of improvement, and, as the poet said, he was dying from a hundred good symptoms." Great bodily weakness affected his mental power at the last. Bolingbroke felt his illness strongly, and cried over him as he sat on his chair. "When I was telling his lordship," Spence writes, "that Mr. Pope, on every catching and recovery of his mind,

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was always saying something kindly either of his present or absent friends, and that this in some cases was so surprising that it seemed to me as if his humanity had outlived his understanding, Lord Bolingbroke said, 'It is so,' and then added, 'I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind. I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's love and friendship than—' (sinking his head and losing his voice in tears)."

This expression of affection on the part of St. John may have been sincere, but his love for Pope could not stand the test of what he deemed an injury. Bolingbroke had given Pope a manuscript copy of the "Patriot King," and after the poet's death he discovered that he had printed an edition of 1,500 copies, with various alterations and omissions. The fault was venial compared with some of Pope's misdoings, but Bolingbroke was indignant, and hired a hackwriter to abuse the memory of his dead friend.

On

A few incidents with regard to Pope's dying days have been recorded. He was glad to see friends, and it was very observable, says Spence, "that Mrs. Blount's coming in gave a new turn of spirits or a temporary strength to him." the 27th May, he was carried down to the room where his friends were at dinner. His dying appearance shocked everyone present, and Miss Ann Arbuthnot, with a touch of her father's spirit, exclaimed, "Lord have mercy upon us! this is quite an Egyptian feast!" Next day Pope sat in his garden in a sedan-chair for three hours, and on the 29th he took an airing in Bushey Park. This was his last sight of Nature, and on the day following, after receiving with great fervour

the last sacraments of his church, Pope died without pain, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, and was buried near his parents in a vault in Twickenham Church. The date of his death was May 30, 1744.

The house and grounds on which he had expended so much labour and money have met with an untoward fate. Pope inherited from his father a love of gardening, and as a landscape gardener is said to have excelled all his contemporaries. His taste was not always good, as is evident from the way in which he adorned his grotto, but he knew how by judicious planting to give character and beauty to a small estate. Thoroughly did he enjoy the art, but it was a melancholy thought to him that he had no one to whom he could leave the villa which he loved so well. The poet's memory should have sufficed to preserve the place as far as possible intact, but the first tenant after his death added wings to the house, and while the second prided himself on preserving whatever remained unaltered, the third, Baroness Howe, not only pulled down the house and built a new one, but destroyed the trees which Pope had planted. The present grotesque residence was erected by a tea-merchant, and pilgrims to Twickenham, allured by the great fame of the poet, will find no local memorial of him beyond the tasteless monument erected by Warburton, and the tablet on which the poet records the death of his parents. In his will he gave instructions that his own death should be also inscribed upon it, and this was accordingly done.

In reading Pope we may find much to regret, but we cannot fail also to enjoy much. His brilliant wit, his mastery of language, his consum

mate art in saying "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed," his occasional dignity and tenderness, and the spirit which gives life to his every line—these are some, but by no means all the merits which have made Pope a power in English verse. He is the poet of an age in which the creative art of the Elizabethans, and their happy voice of song, were exchanged for satire and wit, for rhetorical eloquence and elaborate execution, and if, in estimating Pope's work, the reader follows his wise advice, and " regards the writer's end," he will acknowledge the transcendant ability with which that end has been achieved:

"Where can you show among your names of note
So much to copy and so much to quote?

And where in fine in all our English verse

A style more trenchant and a sense more terse ?" 1

It is easy to point out Pope's limitations, and to compare his poetry with the far richer music and with the more imaginative conceptions of Spenser and of Milton, of Wordsworth and of Keats, but such a comparison is futile, and it is also misleading. Pope could not soar with men like these to the mountain heights of song, neither did he attempt to do so, but if his foot was on lower ground, it was none the less secure, and neither a change of taste, nor the acceptance of any poetical theory, is likely to do a lasting injury to the fame of the poet who wrote the "Imitations of Horace," the " 'Dunciad," and the "Rape of the

Lock."

1 Andrew Lang.