ranged the bottles of tent for toasts in a morning. He pointed to the stands that supported the iron-hooped hogsheads of strong beer; then, stepping to a corner, he lugged out the tattered fragments of an unframed picture. This,' says he, with tears in his eyes,' was poor Sir Thomas, once master of all this drink! He had two sons, poor young masters! who never arrived to the age of this beer; they both fell ill in this very cellar, and never went out upon their own legs.' He could not pass by a heap of broken bottles without taking up a piece, to show us the arms of the family upon it. He then led us up the tower by dark, winding stone steps, which landed us into several little rooms, one above another. One of these was nailed up; and our guide whispered to us a secret occasion of it. It seems the course of this noble blood was a little interrupted, about two centuries ago, by a freak of the Lady Frances with a neighboring priest, since which the room has been nailed up, and branded as the Adultery Chamber. The ghost of Lady Frances is supposed to walk there, and some prying maids of the family report that they have seen a lady in a farthingale through the keyhole; but this matter is hushed up, and the servants are forbid to talk of it.

"I must needs have tired you by this long description; but what engaged me in it was a generous principle to preserve the memory of that which must itself soon fall into dust; nay, perhaps, part of it, before this letter reaches your hands. Indeed, I owe this old house the same gratitude that we do to an old friend, who harbors us in his declining condition, nay, even in his last extremities. I have found this an excellent place for retirement and study, where no one who passes by can dream there is one inhabitant; and even any body that could visit me does not venture under my roof. You will not wonder that I have translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat; any one that sees it will own that I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place to converse with the dead."

No one, after reading this, can doubt that Pope possessed that rare talent of painting in words which Thomson called so truly "the portrait painting of Nature," and which, in a letter to Doddington from Italy, he justly laments as so rare a faculty. "There are scarcely any to be met with who have given a landscape of the country through which they traveled, seen thus with the mind's eye, though that is the first thing which strikes, and what all readers of travels demand." "We must lament," says Warton, "that we have no more letters of Bishop Berkeley, who, we see by this before us (from Naples), possessed the uncommon talent of describing places in the most lively and graphical manner, a talent in which he has only been equaled or excelled by Gray, in many of those lively and interesting letters published by Mason; those especially written during his travels." The want continues to the present hour; the want of the art of bringing the things you speak of livingly before the reader. It is this want, which can only be supplied by the same principles of study in the writer as in the painter, which first suggested to me the necessity of "Visits to Remarkable Places." No one could have made such visits more effectual than Pope. This is a merit for which he yet has received little or no praise; and yet no talent is rarer, and few more delightful. In his letters, especially those addressed to his two lovely, charming, and life-long friends, Martha and Teresa Blount, such living portraitures of places abound. His description of Sir Walter Raleigh's old mansion and gardens at Sherbourne is a master-piece of the kind. You are now at Letcombe, in Berkshire, with Swift, where the author of Gulliver used to run up a hill every morning before breakfast; now at Bevis Mount, near Southampton, with his friend Lord Peterborough, the conqueror of Spain; and in his journeys to Bath, or to Lord Cobham's at Stowe, you peep in at a number of country houses, and rich peeps they are. Bath and London society is sketched with great vivacity and gusto;

66

but such sketches are more common than these peeps into aristocratic country life. Thus you have him rolling along slowly from Cobham toward Bath, drawn by the very horse on which Lord Derwentwater rode in the Rebellion, but then employed by Lord Cobham in rolling the garden. He looks in at Lord Deloraine's on the Downs. He lies one night at Rowsham, the seat of Colonel Cotterell, near Oxford; "the prettiest place for water-falls, jets, ponds inclosed with beautiful scenes of green and hanging wood, ever seen." Then at Mr. Howe's in Gloucestershire, as fine a thing of another kind, where Nature has done every thing, and luckily, for the master has ten children." Then he calls at Sir William Codrington's, at Durhams, eight miles from Bath, where he thus describes his entertainment: "My reception there will be matter for a letter to Mr. Bethel. It was perfectly in his spirit. All his sisters, in the first place, insisted that I should take physic preparatory to the waters, and truly I made use of the time, place, and persons to that end. My Lady Cox, the first night I lay there, mixed my electuary; Lady Codrington pounded sulphur; Mrs. Bridget Bethel ordered broth; Lady Cox mounted first up stairs with the physic in a gallipot; Lady Codrington next, with the vial of oil; Mrs. Bridget third, with pills; the fourth sister with spoons and tea-cups. It would have rejoiced the ghost of Dr. Woodward to have beheld this procession." But two years before his death he was again at Stowe, when he says, " All the mornings we breakfast and dispute; after dinner and at night, music and harmony; in the garden fishing; no politics, and no cards nor novel reading. This agrees exactly with me, for the want of cards sends us early to bed.”

This was the way he describes spending the latter part of his life: "Lord Bathurst is still my constant friend, but his country seat is now always in Gloucestershire, not in this neighborhood. Mr. Pulteney has no country seat; and in town I see him seldom. In the summer I generally

ramble for a month to Lord Cobham's, or to Bath, or elsewhere."

now.

Such were the homes and haunts of Pope. In his life, one thing is very striking. How much the literary men of the time and the nobility associated; how little do they Are our nobility grown less literary, or our authors less aristocratic ? It may be said that authors now are more independent, and can not flatter aristocracy. But no man was more independent, and proud of his independence, than Pope. But I leave this question to wind up this article with a glance at Twickenham as it is.

Pope was anxious that some of his friends should have the lease of his house and grounds, and prevent their being pulled to pieces; but it was never done. Since his day they have gone through various hands. His house has long been pulled down; his willow has fallen down in utter decay; his quincunx has been destroyed. Two new tenements, having the appearance of one house, with a portico opening into the highway, have for some years been built at the further extremity of Pope's grounds next to the Thames. The house itself was stripped, immediately after his death, of all mementoes of him, by the operation of his own will. To Lord Bolingbroke he left his own copy of his Translation of Homer, and his other works. To Lord Marchmont, other books, with the portrait of Bolingbroke by Richardson. To Lord Bathurst, the three statues of the Hercules of Farnese, the Venus de Medici, and the Apollo in chiaro oscuro, by Kneller. To Mr. Murray, the marble head of Homer, by Bernini, and Sir Isaac Newton, by Guelfi. To Dr. Arbuthnot, another picture of Bolingbroke. He left to Lord Littleton the busts in marble of Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, presented to him by the Prince of Wales. His library went among his friends; the pictures of his mother, father, and aunts, to his sisterin-law, Mrs. Rackett. Of that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, by Kneller, there is no mention; but all the

ever.

furniture of his grotto, with the urns for his garden, given by the Prince of Wales, he left to Martha Blount. Thus flew abroad those precious relics, then; and what changes in the place itself! A new house is at this moment rising on a part of the Thames bank, so that there are actually three tenements on the spot, and it is cut up and divided accordingly. With all this havoc, there are still, however, more traces of Pope left than might have been expected. The Thames is there; nothing can remove or cut up that. The scene across the river is woody, rich, and agreeable as The sloping bank from the road to the river, once Pope's garden, is a pretty garden still. There is even at the end nearest to London a conservatory still standing, which has all the characteristics of another age, and probably was Pope's. It has Tuscan columns, and large panes of glass fit for sash windows. But a fine, fantastic sort of Swiss villa is rapidly rising, called by the people about Elizabethan. It has deep, depending eaves, full of wooden ornament, and a lofty tower. It is the property of a Mr. Young, a wholesale tea-dealer. Around were lying heaps of lime and other building materials, when I visited it a few weeks ago, and troops of work-people were busily employed where the lords, ladies, and literati of George II.'s reign resorted.

The subterranean passage, or grotto, still runs under the road, spite of Bowles telling us that all these things were pulled down and done away with. It is secured by iron gates at each end, and far more of the original spar and shell-work remains than you could have believed. Near the opening facing the Thames, under some ivied rockwork, stands the figure of a nun in stone, which, no doubt, has been placed there by some occupant subsequent to Pope.

On the opposite side of the road there is a field of some half dozen acres, still bearing traces of its former character. This was Pope's larger garden and wilderness, where he VOL. I.-I