with revisions and omissions, inserted in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot'. It was the first, as it was the most brilliant, of those satiric sketches of character upon which Pope's genius was to expend its most consummate efforts; so that from hatred, that most powerful passion of the age, was born a species of composition in which its representative poet has excelled all other writers.

In the earlier version of these immortal lines occurs a passage showing clearly enough the source of the taunts which Pope allowed himself to launch against one to whom he was yet, happily for his reputation, to live to make partial amends:

'Who, if two wits on rival themes contest,

Approves of both, but likes the worst the best.'

His resentment further blinded him into charging Addison with the real authorship of Tickell's Homer; but this charge was soon dropped. Meanwhile Addison remained serenely imperturbable, replying to Pope's satire by a more than complimentary reference to his Homer in the Freeholder, where he ranked it on a level with Dryden's Vergil. And thus, the quarrel, like all quarrels conducted on one side only, could proceed no further. Yet (as the republication, so late as 1735, of the verses upon Addison proves) the offence, whether real or imaginary, long continued to rankle in Pope's breast. Was it real, or was it imaginary? Allowing Addison to have been fully responsible for Tickell's proceeding, we are not obliged as a necessary consequence to condemn him for having permitted it. Nor can he as a critic who, like few in his age, was anxious to discover beauties rather than detect flaws, be blamed for having praised both Tickell's and Pope's translations in accordance with his high opinion of either. In neither case, as modern critics are fain to agree, was that high opinion wholly undeserved, though in either it was exaggerated. On the other hand there is much significance in the observations on this subject of one of the most penetrating students of literary men and manners. 'It was natural,' writes Thackeray 3, that Pope and Pope's friends should believe that this counter-translation, suddenly advertised and so long written,— though Tickell's college-friends had never heard of it, though when Pope first wrote to Addison regarding his scheme Addison knew nothing of the similar projects of Tickell's, -it was natural that Pope and his friends, having interests, passions, and prejudices of their own, should believe that Tickell's translation was but an act of opposition against Pope, and that they should call Tickell's emulation Addison's envy,'-"if envy,' adds the same writer, 'it were.' The solution of the last query must be found in our estimate of the character of Addison; a character the whiteness of which, after annoying generation after generation of sceptics, rests as unstained as if it had never been subjected to examination at their pains-taking

(vv. 215-220), published in 1737.
3 In his Lectures on the English Humourists.

hands. But whatever the character of Addison, Pope and his age at all events preferred to judge it according to their own standard.

V.

We turn for a moment from the progress of Pope's literary career to the circumstances of his personal life, though indeed it would be a futile attempt to endeavour to dissociate the two. Soon after the publication of the first volume of Pope's Homer, he removed with his parents from Binfield to Chiswick, where they settled in the spring of 1716, for a sojourn which was not to extend over more than a couple of years. By this time Pope had already become a welcome guest in the fashionable circles of the metropolis and its vicinity; nor could it be otherwise than that the influence of female fascination should be brought to bear upon his susceptible nature. It was very well for Walsh to have admonished him, as an author of sixteen, to take occasion (in his Fourth Pastoral) 'to shew the difference between Poets' mistresses and other men's1;' but such problems require, even in the case of poets, to be worked out by experience; and Pope was not anxious to avoid the opportunities with which he met.

Before his admission into the fashionable life of the Town, his personal acquaintances had been chiefly restricted to the Catholic gentry of the counties around Windsor. Among these were the Carylls of Sussex, of whom John Caryll (formerly secretary to the Consort of James II.) became one of Pope's most favoured correspondents. Among the members of this family who in Gay's congratulatory poem 'come by dozens' to grace the Translator's triumph, was the 'Unhappy Lady,' whose melancholy story has been mingled up with that of the 'Unfortunate Lady' whose case gave rise to Pope's beautiful elegy. Another of these Families was that of the Fermors of Tusmore in Oxfordshire, of whom Miss Arabella Fermor was immortalised as Belinda in the Rape of the Lock. But a closer interest attached Pope to a third Catholic family, the Blounts of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, near Reading. The head of this family, Mr Lister Blount, had two daughters named Teresa and Martha, born respectively in the years 1688 and 1690. Both these ladies had received part of their education at Paris, where the natural vivacity of their dispositions had been heightened, and the charm of their manners had received an additional piquancy. Scandal afterwards busied itself with the progress of the relations between Pope and these ladies, in which however there seems nothing either unnatural or unparalleled. It seems clear that as Pope's acquaintance with the Miss Blounts ripened into intimacy, he came to admire them both; that his attentions, poetic and other, were at first chiefly addressed to the elder sister, but that in the end the younger Martha became the object of a

1 See Walsh's letter to Pope, dated Sept.

9th, 1706.

2 The well known instance of Schiller's rela

tions towards the sisters of whom one became his wife, may be cited in illustration of part of a very easy psychological problem.

lifelong sentiment, oscillating between friendship and a deeper feeling, but tinged to the last with the warm hues of an unselfish devotion. Whether Pope was ever in love with Martha Blount is a question of terms rather than of facts. The report that, when almost at the point of death he offered her marriage, seems nothing more than a baseless invention. The feeling which he entertained towards her might have operated differently in the case of a different man. It is certain that his regard, both for herself and for her sister, involved him in a desperate broil with a volatile fopling (James Moore Smythe) who had ventured upon a pastoral flirtation with the lively sisters. It is more than probable that for Martha's sake he descended to an action which cast the worst of stains upon his literary honour1. And to Martha Blount, on his decease, Pope bequeathed 'out of a sincere regard and long friendship for her' the largest share of his personal property.

It was hardly however to be expected that Pope's affection towards the Miss Blounts should preclude him from offering the incense of his adoration from time to time to other beauties. Scandal alone (or hyperconscientious biography) has contrived to pervert the character of his relations towards the ladies of Mapledurham2; but scandal itself must allow the innocence of his admiration for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. To this celebrated personage he was introduced through the medium of Mrs Howard, afterwards Countess of Suffolk, a lady to whose influence over the Prince of Wales (afterwards George II.) no bounds existed, until they were imposed by his political sagacity. With Lady Mary love of admiration had been a passion ever since the day when her father had introduced her as a child to the boisterous attentions of the Kit-Cat Club3; and she devoted herself to literary pursuits and studies with an energy unusual among ladies of rank since the days of Queen Elizabeth. It was therefore not wonderful that she should be gently attracted by the pronounced homage of an already fashionable author. Nor was there anvthing in the nature of the attentions she received and permitted, to arouse the suspicions of her even-minded husband, or to offer materials sufficient at a later date to exercise the malice with which Horace Walpole endeavoured to colour all her actions. During her absence with her husband in the East (from 1716 to '18) Lady Mary allowed Pope to address her in the strains of a masquerade lover, but her replies are characterised by a cool irony which even her correspondent cannot have deluded himself into interpreting as self-restraint. After her return, when she became his near neighbour at Twickenham, his vanity seems to have beeen ultimately wounded by some instance of the equanimity to which she had from the first done her best to accustom him. For there is no reason to believe that a fancied jealousy had

1 By consenting, in order to obtain the capital for an investment for her benefit, to accept a large sum from the Duchess of Marlborough in return for the suppression of a satirical attack upon her character.

2 It is difficult, notwithstanding the indignant Reply of Bowles (printed in Vol. xvii. of the

Pamphleteer) to acquit him of the attempt, in his biography of Pope, to charge the 'licentiousness of the man' with an offence imputable to the grossness of the times.'

3 See the well known story in Lord Wharncliffe's Introductory Anecdotes to the Letters of Lady M. W. M.

anything to do with the offence. Gradually they became bitter enemies; and, together with her favourite associate Lord Hervey, Lady Mary came to be included in the category of the best-abused victims of Pope's vindictive satire. His specific charges against her have been satisfactorily disproved; but such was Pope's satirical genius that Sappho is no more than any of his other characters of women or men a mere caricature. Lady Mary was unwise enough to venture upon retorts which have by no means added to her literary fame. As she ceased to reside in England from the summer of 1739, the most ignoble warfare of Pope's literary life then came to a natural end.

No other similar relation added its perturbation to the agitations of Pope's life. The bevy of beautiful maids of honour who adorned the court of the Princess of Wales (where he was a frequent visitor at the time of his residence at Chiswick) were delighted by the flatteries of his versatile wit. And rather later, from 1722 to '3, a passing attachment seems to have occupied his imagination towards Miss Judith Cowper, which appropriately came to an end with her marriage towards the close of the latter year1.

Nor were brilliant friendships of another kind formed by Pope during the period of his residence at Chiswick, able to detach him from the serious business of his life. The heroes of fashion, such as Lord Peterborough, the hero of Barcelona, and the dictators of taste, such as Lord Burlington, made him welcome in town and country; and he followed the fashion of his day by summer excursions to the Bath. Yet it was far from an idle period of his literary life. For besides carrying on his translation of the Iliad, he found time to produce some of his most finished poetic efforts, among them the Epistle of Eloïsa to Abelard (of which the address appears in the course of composition to have been transferred from Martha Blount to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and the exquisite Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.

As no period of Pope's life was without its quarrels, so that of his residence at Chiswick was disturbed by two at least which may not be passed over in a narrative of his career. In 1716 he first came into the hostile contact which it was, indeed, difficult for any author of note to avoid, with the notorious pirate-publisher Edmund Curll. It was the invariable practice of this individual to publish any piece popularly attributed to an eminent name, in an unauthorised edition with that name attached to it. He had adopted this course with a series of very common-place burlesque poems called the Town-Eclogues, of which only one had been actually written by Pope himself. The latter, as usual irretentive of his dignity, wrote several pamphlets against Curll, of which the first is the Account of the Poisoning of Edmund Curll; a coarse burlesque narrative of the effects produced upon the bookseller by

1 She was the daughter of Judge Spencer Cowper, and the niece of the great Chancellor; she married Colonel Madan; and to their daughter Frances Maria, afterwards wife of Major

Cowper and the friend and correspondent of her cousin the poet, she transmitted her own poetical and devout spirit. See Hayley's Life of William Cowper.

a half-pint of wine drunk by him in Pope's company, effects actually attributed by the sufferer to the malice of the poet. It was to guard themselves against the indefatigable activity of Curll that Pope and Swift afterwards published their Miscellanies in an authorised form; and the same publisher afterwards put forth the surreptitiously obtained correspondence of Pope with Cromwell, and at a later date engaged in the publication of his letters to various friends, abstracted, as Pope declared, by equally nefarious means1.

Early in the following year (1717) the production of the farce of Three Hours after Marriage, in which Gay had been assisted by Arbuthnot and Pope, occasioned the outbreak of a quarrel between the latter and Colley Cibber. The farce itself (Pope's co-operation in which constituted his solitary dramatic effort) is beneath contempt. Pope, as Gay afterwards admitted, 'never heartily approved of' the piece. Nor can the wit of those parts in which the hand of Pope is clearly discernible, and where Dennis is caricatured as Sir Tremendous, and literary ladies of the day under other names, be fairly said to rise above the level of the remainder. The play was however damned on account of the extravagant nonsense of its last act, in which two lovers insert themselves respectively into the skins of a mummy and a crocodile. The Rehearsal, a play always used (like its successor the Critic) as an opportunity for introducing gag on popular topics of the day, happened to be performed shortly afterwards. Colley Cibber on this occasion introduced an allusion to the unhappy mummy and crocodile. Pope, whose presence in the theatre may have added to the effect of the allusion, sharply inveighed against the actor behind the scenes ; and the latter not unnaturally swore to repeat the joke on every future occasion. To this episode Cibber in his Apology attributes the origin of Pope's animosity against him. There can be little doubt that the production towards the close of the year of Cibber's Non-Juror (so successful an attack upon Jacobites and concealed Papists that a patriotic pamphlet of the day desired to see it as common in every house as a Prayer-book or Whole Duty of Man) added a worthier cause of anger in Pope's mind against the future laureate of King George II.

Thus, amidst studies and diversions Pope's life continued until the death of his father, which took place at Chiswick in October 1717. The blow was keenly felt by the son whom he left to mourn his loss. To his father, as we have seen, Pope owed much beyond the discreet liberality which had allowed him to choose his own path in life, and enabled him in his early years to pursue his favourite studies. For to his father he was indebted for the example of a moral uprightness which in the main he endeavoured faithfully to follow; and for the noble lesson of adherence to a persecuted creed. After his father's death Pope might have abandoned the profession of the Catholic faith; and exchanged a Church with whose tenets he can hardly be supposed to have entertained an intellectual sympathy, for one towards which he was urged by the representations of venerated friends. But in answer to Atterbury's

1 See below, p. xl.