brought her to the gates of death, till the prayers of the church for her recovery were invoked. Her corpse lay for several days on the "Parade Bed," the new Czar and his Czarina, and future murderess, feasting, and dancing, and dining, and receiving the congratulations of their subjects; Elizabeth's palace quite deserted but by the ladies and gentlemen in waiting, to whom the duty had been assigned to keep watch over the dead, and who avenged their temporary exclusion from the gaieties of the new court by petty sarcasms and jokes at the expense of the departed, on whose face in life they dared not look without awe. The grand saloon of the palace, where stood the imperial bier, was draped with black, and festooned and garlanded with cloth of silver. The sombreness of the chamber was deepened by the flickering wax lights. The coffin itself was covered with cloth of gold trimmed with silver lace. A rich crown was placed on the head of the corpse. The watchers referred to, who enlivened the gloom of the occasion with jest and chaff, were four ladies and two officers of the Life Guards; their robes were symbolic of the profoundest sorrow and lamentation. At the foot of the bier stood a priest reading his Bible aloud, to be relieved by another when his voice failed him; the holy incantation not only drove back the aggressive powers of evil, urgent to claim the body as theirs by right, but magically opened the doors of heaven to give the emancipated spirit abundant entrance. All who came to gaze on the face of the corpse had to kiss its hand; such is Russian etiquette.

The Czarina was buried with pomp and pageant. The distance from the palace to the tomb of the Czars was 2 English miles, which were paved with wood for the occasion. On each side of the street the soldiers of the garrison were drawn up in line. At ten in the morning the solemn procession left the castle, the bells of St. Petersburg ringing out clear and mellow to the frosty skies. First there marched 300 grenadiers, followed by 300 priests clothed in white, walking two abreast, and singing dirge and prayer. Next came, in single file, the high dignitaries of the empire, bearing the crown and the insignia of the various orders and honours conferred on the deceased by herself and others. The hearse was followed by the new Czar, his mourning cloak spread out like a sheet and carried by twelve chamberlains, each with a lighted candle in his disengaged hand. The relatives of the Czar came next, followed by Catherine on foot, whose cloak was borne by her ladies. Three hundred grenadiers brought up the rear of the procession, which was preceded, attended, and followed by the jostling and brawling populace of the capital.

JAMES FORFAR,

615

E

SOME OF POPE'S FRIENDS.

VERY reader who is acquainted with the literature of the Queen Anne period knows something of Pope's quarrels with the Grub Street hacks of the day, as well as with authors whose place in literature is equal, or nearly equal, to his own. Indeed, we are

so accustomed to think of Pope as he appears in the "Dunciad" and in his famous "Epistles," that we are apt to forget that, if he was sometimes a relentless enemy, he was also a warm-hearted and, in many instances, a faithful friend. The investigations of the late Mr. Dilke have laid bare to the world the dissimulations and artifices of this consummate satirist; and the world, which values truth above all things, ought, no doubt, to be grateful to the critic for exhibiting in all their minuteness the foibles of a great man. Pope's love of equivocating, which he allowed he could do "pretty genteelly," is a fault too palpable to be concealed. He had a passion for intrigue, and "hardly drank tea without a stratagem;" he liked to deceive his friends, and doubtless in many cases he deceived himself. No writer ever expressed more exalted sentiments, but his virtuous aspirations were too often confined to couplets and to letter-writing. Faults such as these-and they are by no means venial faults—must be acknowledged by all students of Pope. They will find in his poems what Mr. Ruskin calls "a serene and just benevolence," and "the most lofty expression of moral temper;" but the prevailing tone of his verse bears another character, and the impressiveness of his finest lines is due to the venom of the satirist, and not to the high thinking of the philosopher. It would be unjust, however, as a great critic has said, to estimate illustrious men solely by their defects; and it would be especially unjust in the case of Pope, whose failings were probably due in large measure to physical causes. His life was one long disease, and a highly sensitive temperament was linked to a crazy body. On the other hand, it is to Pope's honour that he never fell into the indolent habits of the valetudinarian. His courage was indomitable, and the high position he won in literature was gained despite the impediments of an alien faith, of a comparatively humble position, and of an imperfect education. Before he was thirty years

old he was the most distinguished poet and man of letters in England, and men of the highest rank and reputation were proud to be numbered amongst his associates. And it deserves to be remembered that there was no servility in Pope's friendship. If he "dearly loved a lord," and cultivated the acquaintance of peers and statesmen, there is no indication that he forgot his own dignity; and none of the friends whom he honoured, whether titled or untitled, were ever neglected in his verse. Nothing, indeed, can be more graceful than the art with which, in a line or word, he has embalmed their memory; but it must be admitted that he has exercised even greater art in pillorying the men who incurred his enmity. To offend Pope was to run the risk of an unenviable notoriety, and of being "hitched" into rhymes that genius has made immortal. And the spite which, as in the well-known case of Addison, produced the satire was generally more obvious than the provocation.

Pope's early aspirations after fame were combined with an almost feminine desire for friendship, and he seems throughout life to have been morbidly conscious that he needed support and sympathy. When he was a mere youth, "lisping in numbers," Sir William Trumbull, a veteran statesman, made his acquaintance, and the old man and precocious boy became fast friends. Sir William gave the young poet wise advice, and introduced him to Wycherley, which, as it turned out, did not prove a wise step; and through "manly Wycherley," as Pope calls him, he made the acquaintance of "knowing Walsh," a small poet, but a critic of some reputation. Henry Cromwell, another man of mature age, and recognised as a wit, who had known Dryden, seems also to have patronised Pope, and the stilted correspondence that passed between them may still be read with advantage. We need not look too closely into the poet's intimacy with men old enough to be his father. Pope soon learnt to feel his own superiority to his early patrons, and in the case of Wycherley expressed it too bluntly. His genius, indeed, matured so rapidly that a short time sufficed to place him on a level with men who are still the greatest ornaments of a great literary age-with Addison and Steele, with Swift and Congreve, with Arbuthnot and Bolingbroke. As a Roman Catholic, Pope might be suspected of a leaning to the Jacobites, but he was, as he once wrote to Caryll, "the least a politician in the world," and his estrangement from such notable Whigs as Addison and Steele was not due to political causes. In the early days of authorship Pope addressed both these delightful humourists in a strain of the warmest affection. The friendship of Addison was, he said, one of his "best comforts ;" and writing to

Steele of diminutives used in Latin as marks of affection, he adds, "I should myself be much better pleased if I were told you called me your little friend than if you complimented me with the title of a great genius." These expressions are not worth much, and there are no indications that Pope's regard either for Addison or Steele was at any time sincere.

There was one friendship of those early days which knew no break, and lasted for a quarter of a century. Pope's love for Gay, whose acquaintance he appears to have made through Henry Cromwell, was as genuine as the poet's affection for his mother. Every one, indeed, loved Gay, who, to use a vulgar phrase, was no one's enemy but his own; and Pope took him to his heart almost as soon as the two became acquainted. Gay's gentle, social nature readily received impressions from Pope's stronger intellect, and what he felt he uttered with a generous impulse. Never, surely, was poet flattered with more graceful art than that which Gay lavished upon his friend in the famous poem written "on his completing his translation of Homer's Iliad.'" Pope loved his fame even more than his friends, but this noble tribute must have served to strengthen both fame and friendship.

There was no sense of rivalry here, but there was a sympathy of taste and of pursuit, and that contrast of disposition which adds a zest to friendship. Swift as well as Pope loved Gay, and there. is nothing pleasanter or apparently more sincere in the correspondence between them than their allusions to this common friend. They laugh at Gay for his love of luxury, for his eagerness as a courtier, for his idleness, for his incapacity to manage his affairs; but the laugh is always a kindly one. Pope describes him as sprinkled with rose-water; and Swift writes, "I suppose Mr. Gay will return from the Bath with twenty pounds more flesh and two hundred less in money. Providence never designed him to be above two-andtwenty by his thoughtlessness and cullibility. He has as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty, or loss of admirers as a girl of fifteen." And Gay seems to have been as sensitive as a girl. When one of his plays was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, he had an attack of illness; and when he lost the fortune he had won in South Sea stock, the disappointment nearly cost him his life. Gay found, as Spenser found long before, "what hell it is in suing long to bide." "Oh that I had never known what a court was!" he exclaimed ; and it was when oppressed by the vanity of his labour as a courtier that he penned the melancholy couplet he intended for his epitaph. When Gay was buried in Westminster Abbey, "as if," said Arbuthnot,

"he had been a peer of the realm," Pope lamented that "one of the nearest and longest ties" of his life was broken "all on a sudden."

Gay belonged to what Mr. Elwin significantly calls the "inner circle" of Pope's friends; and we have frequent glimpses of his fat figure at Twickenham and at Dawley, where Lord Bolingbroke, as Pope told Swift, laboured to be unambitious, and laboured in an unwilling soil. Knowing Bolingbroke as we do, it seems ridiculous to read of his aping the life of a farmer, sitting among the haymakers, and dining off mutton broth, beans, and bacon. When Pope was at the height of his fame Bolingbroke was one of his most intimate associates, and the influence of his mind upon that of the poet is seen in the " Essay on Man." For at least ten years the friends were constantly together, and both at Dawley and at Twickenham the first wits of the age were accustomed to assemble. To both houses Voltaire found his way, and so did Peterborough, who "had seen more kings and postillions than any one in Europe;" and "mitred Rochester," who would nod the head in approval of the poet's lays; and Bathurst, who lived to see his son Lord Chancellor, and to sit under the shade of the trees which he and Pope had planted; and Arbuthnot, who could do everything but walk; and Swift, the poet's dearest and greatest friend, whose praise made, as he said, his studies happy and their author happier. Great, one would think, must have been "the feast of reason and the flow of soul" when men such as these conversed across the walnuts and the wine; but it may be doubted whether Pope was a very genial host, for Swift has a gentle sneer at him for stinginess about wine, and observes that he was a silent, inattentive companion. He said himself that, though he loved company, he loved reading better than talk. Moreover, he never laughed heartily; and the man who cannot laugh is not likely to enliven conversation.

In the later years of his life Pope found a new and zealous friend in Warburton, to whose ingenuity he was indebted for defending the doubtful orthodoxy of the "Essay on Man." Warburton, superficial in knowledge and dogmatic in argument, seems at one period to have thought meanly of Pope's genius, and especially of his famous Essay. A change of opinion or of policy led him, however, to defend the poem, and Pope discovered that he was the greatest critic he had ever known. They met for the first time in Lord Radnor's garden at Twickenham, and Dodsley the bookseller, who was present, told Dr. Warton he was astonished at the high compliments paid by Pope to Warburton. The acquaintance, of course, soon became