flout Addison and his powerful clique, and he had formed an alliance with Swift. In short, although the actual amount of his published writings was small, the quality of them was so extraordinary that at the age of twenty-six Pope was, without question, the most eminent man of letters in England, where letters had enjoyed so brilliant a revival. Meanwhile, he had begun to prepare his great metrical translation of Homer, a work which had been suggested to him, when he was still a boy, by Sir W. Trumbull. He had been receiving subscriptions for it for several months, when, soon after the death of Queen Anne, he discovered, to his exceeding wrath, that Addison had been urging Tickell to put forward a rival version. As a matter of fact Tickell's First Iliad and l'ope's earliest instalment appeared simultaneously in June 1715. The inferiority. of the former was so obvious that it greatly helped Pope, who, as Doctor Johnson said, "was meditating a criticism upon Tickell, when his adversary sank before him without a blow." Pope was none the less excessively incensed, and it is probable (though not certain) that it was at this time that he wrote the celebrated attack on Addison as Atticus, which was first publishedand then not openly by Pope himself-in 1723. In November 1713, to return to Homer, Swift was informing polite society that "the best poet in England was Mr. Pope, a Papist," and was making everybody subscribe. Alexander Pope From a Portrait in the possession of Lord Leconfield at Petworth From this time forward the anxiety to see the new version was intense, and the publication of the first of its six volumes a public event. The issue of the whole of Homer occupied eleven years (1715-1726), and Pope received nearly £9000, much of which he was able to invest, and so, "thanks to Homer, could live and thrive, indebted to n prince or peer alive." This work, although a translation or rather a paraphrase, awakened universal admiration, and may be styled the most important single work in belles lettres produced in the Age of Anne. Its effect upon taste was prodigious. The Iliad was translated entirely by Pope; but in order to complete the Odyssey he called in the help of two Cambridge poet-scholars, Elijah Fenton and William Droome, who between them performed half the task. With the latter of these colleagues he unfortunately quarrelled. The scholarship of Pope was far from adequate and was challenged even at the time; yet the most severe critics agreed with Bentley that, if we must "not call it Homer," it was yet a "pretty poem." Pope knew very little Greek, "an awkward qualification," as Mr. Leslie Stephen confesses, "for a translator of Homer." In early days in London, Pope had attempted to live the gay life to which his years, but not his constitution, attracted him; he had called himself "the gayest valetudinaire, the most thinking rake alive." But after 1715 he began, although not yet thirty, to settle into middle life. He moved from Binfield to Chiswick in 1716, and in 1718, when his father died, to the villa at Twickenham which he made SO famous, and where he resided until the end of his life. Here he "twisted and twirled, and rhymed and harmonized" five acres of garden until it became "two or three sweet little lawns, opening into one another, and surrounded with impenetrable woods." His mystic temples made of shells and his gimcrack obelisks are gone, but his grotto still remains to witness to his ingenuity. While he was settling in, he lived with the Chancellor at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, and published the fifth volume of his Homer. At Twickenham he cemented his old and now somewhat mysterious friendship with Teresa and Martha Blount of Mapledurham; in 1730 he spoke of the latter as a friend -a woman friend, God help me!-with whom I have spent three or four hours a day these fifteen years." In 1717 Pope issued his works in one quarto volume, and this contained the first appearance of two important poems, Eloisa to Abelard and To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. After this, for many years, his energies were wholly absorbed by his work with Homer, which he gradually grew to feel a burden. He edited Parnell's Works, with a fine epistle of his own, in 1722. When Homer was finished, Pope joined Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay in the publication of two volumes of miscellanies (1727-28); the humours of this conjoint work set his mind running on satire, which he had lately neglected, and he began to prepare his elaborate and multiform lampoon, The Dunciad, which was appearing in many diverse conditions from 1728 till as late as 1742. This was a loud and sometimes a coarse burst of mockery directed at William Walsh (1663-1708) After the Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller at Bayfordbury * all the little scribblers of the hour, and at every one else who had awakened Pope's ill-humour by any sort of attack upon him. For twenty years he had been bottling up his resentment, and now he poured it forth in a glitter of liquid. poison. The mortality among the Dunces was terrific. Meanwhile, using the Dunciad as a flood-gate, Pope was more seriously and artistically employed in storing up verse of a much more exquisite order. In 1731 he had published. Martha Blount From a Drawing by Gardner his epistle Of False Taste, and had read to Bolingbroke three books of a "noble work" on philosophy. This was the famous Essay on Man, which appeared in four instalments in 1733-34. From 1731 to 1738 Pope was publishing, in a rapid and continuous stream, imitations of the Epistles and the Satires of Horace, adapted to the mundane life of the early Georgian period. Among these, and destined to serve as a prologue to the double series, if it had ever been completed, was the splendid Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734, so rich in autobiographical detail. The general system upon which these poems were to take their appointed places in one great work fell through, however; but just as Pope was abandoning the idea, an adoring commentator arose in the shape of Warburton, who vindicated the ways of the poet to himself. By the means of this clever, unscrupulous divine, Pope was gradually weaned away from the influence of Bolingbroke, which had hitherto been supreme with him, and from this time he was, or at least believed himself to be, broadly orthodox. Warburton preserved his remarkable sway over Pope's mind until the death of the poet. During the last years of his life, Pope did not write much that was new, but polished his writings and re-arranged them for publication. His mother, to whom he was passionately attached, had died, at a very great age, in 1733, but Pope had Martha Blount with him to the last. Although he was only fifty-five, it became obvious in the early spring of 1744 that Pope was dying of old age; his bodily frame was quite worn out with asthma and dropsy. Friends gathered round him, Spence and Bolingbroke in particular. Quite clear in mind, it amused the poet to send out his Ethic Epistles to the last, and, as he smilingly said, to "dispense my morality as I lie dying," as he put it on another occasion, "of a hundred good symptoms." On the 30th of May 1744 he passed away painlessly and softly. He was buried-being, although the greatest poet of his time, yet a Catholic-in his family vault at Twickenham, not in Westminster Abbey. No English writer has attracted more curiosity, nor has interested more perennially successive generations of biographers. His figure is made very lively to us by a great variety of anecdotes. He was not blind to the peculiarities of his own physique; he did not disguise the fact that he had "a crazy carcase." He required to be lifted out of bed, and could not stand until he was laced into a sort of armour. Nevertheless he had great, but intermittent vivacity; when he was excited, he justly described himself as "a lively little creature, with long legs and arms; a spider is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill." His physical weakness, no doubt, was in great part responsible for a love of intrigue and even of downright trickery, which has made the unravelling of his correspondence an absolutely impossible task. This little brilliant man of letters, who had a host of admirable qualities, was an arch-deceiver and a miracle of half-hypocritical artfulness. For all this, poor man, his memory has been only too cruelly punished, and it behoves an honest reader to-day to think more of what was lovable and enlightened and impressive in the genius of Pope than of his ridiculous affectations and deplorable pettinesses. He was a very great man imprisoned in a little ricketty body which warped and pinched certain members of his mind. Let those who judge him Teresa Blount From a Drawing by Gardner harshly read the account of that long disease, his life, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. FROM THE "ESSAY ON CRITICISM." A little learning is a dang'rous thing; And drinking largely sobers us again. Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts, So pleased at first the tow'ring Alps we try |