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 harbours 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 travelled,-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 equalled 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 masterpiece 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; but such sketches are more common than these peeps into aristocratic country life. Thus you have him rolling along slowly from Cobham towards 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 waterfalls, jets, ponds enclosed 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 everything, 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 neighbourhood. 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."

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 they do now. Are our nobility grown less literary, or our authors less aristocratic? It may be said that authors now are more independent, and cannot flatter aristocracy. But no man was more independent, and proud of his independence, than Pope.

Pope was anxious that some of his friends should have the lease of his house and grounds, to prevent their being demolished; 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 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 farther extremity of Pope's grounds next to the Thames. The house itself was stripped, immediately after his death, of all mementos 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 the son of 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 amongst his friends; the pictures of his mother, father, and aunts, to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Rackett. Of that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, by Kneller, there is no mention; but all the 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 since in the place itself! A new house has recently arisen 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 ever. 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 has sprung up there, called by the neighbourhood Elizabethan. It has deep, depending eaves, full of wooden ornament, and a lofty tower. It is the property of Mr. Young, a wholesale tea-dealer. When I visited it, heaps of lime and other building materials were lying around, 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 rock-work, 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 used to plant and replant, contrive and recontrive, pull down and build up, to his heart's content. Around it still are traces of shrubberies, and over all are scattered many of those trees which, upwards of a hundred years ago, Pope said he was busy planting for posterity. They are now stupendous in size-Spanish chestnuts, elms, and cedars. No doubt many of them have been felled, but what remain are lofty and magnificent trees. The walks and shrubberies are to a great extent annihilated; the centre of the field was planted with potatoes. In the midst of a clump of old laurels, near the road, there is the remains of a large tree, hewn out into the shape of a seat, not unlike a watchman's box, which is said to have been Pope's, but is doubtful, At the top of the grounds is another grotto, that which was erected by Sir William Stanhope, who purchased the estate, or the lease of it, at Pope's death. This grotto seems to have formed the passage to still further grounds; for we are informed that Sir William Stanhope not only built two wings to Pope's house, but extended

his grounds. There was a bust of Pope in white following inscription :-

placed over the entrance of this grotto marble, and on a white marble slab the

"The humble roof, the garden's scanty line,

Ill spoke the genius of a bard divine:

But fancy now displays a fairer scope,

And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope."-Clare.

These vaunting lines, which represent the addition of another grotto and another field as unfolding the soul of Pope, and Sir William Stanhope as somebody capable of far greater things than the poet himself, still remain, the monument of the writer's and the erector's folly. The bust, of course, is gone. The grotto is lined with spars; pieces of basalt, perhaps the very joints of the Giant's Causeway sent to Pope by Sir Hans Sloane in 1742, only two years before Pope's death; some huge pieces of glazed and striped jars of pottery; and masses of stalactites and of stone worn by the action of the waters, evidently brought from some cavernous shore, or bed of a torrent, perhaps from a great distance, and no doubt at great expense. As this, however, was the work of Sir William Stanhope, and not of Pope, the whole possesses little interest. Every trace of the temple of which Pope speaks, as being in full view from his grotto, is annihilated; and the small obelisk, bearing this inscription in memory of his mother,

Ah! Editha,
Matrum Optima,
Mulierum Amantissima,

Vale!

has been removed, and is said to be in the possession of Lord Howe, and set up in his grounds, just by.

Lord Mendip, who married Sir William Stanhope's daughter, is said to have been particularly anxious to retain every trace of Pope. Yet in his care to maintain, he must have very much altered. He stuccoed the house, and adorned it, says a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, in an elegant style. He enclosed the lawn, and propped with uncommon care the far-famed weeping willow, supposed to be the parent stock of the willows in Twickenham Park. Yes, Pope is said to have been the introducer of the weeping willow into England; -that seeing some twigs around the wrapping of an article of vertu sent to Lady Sylvius from abroad, he planted these, saying they might belong to some kind of tree yet unknown in England. From one of these sprung Pope's willow, and from Pope's willow thousands of others. Slips of his tree were anxiously sought after; they were even transmitted to distant climes; and, in 1789, the Empress of Russia had some planted in her garden at Petersburgh. Notwithstanding every care, old age overcame this willow, and in spite of all props, it perished, and fell to the ground in 1801.

On the decease of Lord Mendip, in 1802, the property was sold to Sir John Briscoe, Bart.; after whose death, it was again sold to the Baroness Howe. This lady, and her husband, Sir J. Waller Wathen, with a tasteless Vandalism, levelled the house of Pope to the ground; extirpated ruthlessly almost every possible trace of him in the

gardens; and erected that house already mentioned at the extremity of Pope's property, now occupied as two tenements. This house of the unpoetical Lady Howe was also erected on the site of an elegant little villa belonging to Hudson, the painter, the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Such are the revolutions which have passed over Pope's villa and its grounds. Where he and such celebrated gardeners as Swift, Bolingbroke, and Gay laboured, I found potatoes, black with the disease of 1846, growing. How long the giant trees planted by his hands, and which still lift aloft their noble heads, may escape some fresh change, we know not. The whole of the larger garden of Pope, in which they grow, bears evidences of neglect. Laurels grow wild under the lofty hedges. The stones of Stanhope's grotto lie scattered about; and vast quantities of the deadly nightshade, as if undisturbed for years, displayed to my notice its dark purple and burnished berries of death.

The remains of Pope rest, with those of his parents, in Twickenham church. In the middle aisle, the sexton shows you a P in one of the stones, which marks the place of their interment. To see the monuments to their memory, you must ascend into the north gallery; where, at the east end, on the wall, you find a tablet with a Latin inscription, which was placed there by Pope in honour of his parents; and on the side wall of the gallery nearest the west is a tablet of grey marble, in a pyramidal form, with a medallion profile of the poet. This was placed here by Bishop Warburton, and bears the following inscription :

ALEXANDRO POPE. M. H. Gulielmus Episcopus, Glocestriensis,
Amicitiæ causâ fac: cur: 1761.
Poeta loquitur.

FOR ONE WHO WOULD NOT BE BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

Heroes and kings, your distance keep;

In peace let one poor poet sleep,
Who never flattered folks like you:
Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.

By one of those acts which neither science nor curiosity can excuse, the skull of Pope is now in the private collection of a phrenologist. The manner in which it was obtained is said to have been this. On some occasion of alteration in the church, or burial of some one in the same spot, the coffin of Pope was disinterred, and opened to see the state of the remains; by a bribe to the sexton of the time, possession of the skull was obtained for a night, and another skull returned instead of it. I have heard that fifty pounds were paid to manage and carry through this transaction. Be that as it may, the undoubted skull of Pope now figures in the phrenological collection of the late Mr. Holm, of Highgate, and was frequently exhibited by him in his lectures, as demonstrating, by its not large but well-balanced proportions, its affinity to the intellectual character of the poet.