^be Camelot Series Edited by Ernest Rhys. SPENCE'S ANECDOTES, OBSERVATIONS, AND CHARACTERS OF BOOKS AND MEN. S PENCE'S "ANEC^OtFeS, OBSERVATIONS, AND CHARACTERS OF BOOKS AND MEN." A SELECTION, EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY JOHN UNDERHILL. LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW. ?H LIBRAKY UNIVERSITY OF CALTFORNIA SANTA BARBARA CONTENTS. Introduction PAOE vii PART I.— GENERAL LITERARY ANECDOTES. A.DDISON Arbuthnot Atterbury . Betterton . bolingbroke Buckingham (Sheffield, Duke of) „ (ViLLiERS, Duke of) ClBBER Cowley D'Avenant . Dorset Dryden Etheredge, Congreve, v. Fenton and Broome Garth Gay . Kneller anbrugh, and Farquhar 3 IS 17 20 22 30 31 34 36 38 40 51 53 55 59 vi CONTENTS. PAGE Montague (Lady Mary) 63 Newton 68 Otway 72 Peterborough 12> Philips (Ambrose) 76 Prior 78 ROWE 81 Steele ^^ Swift 85 Thomson 89 West . 91 Wycherley 93 Young 99 PART II.— MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES 107 PART III.— BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES RELATING TO POPE . . . . . .119 PART IV.— CRITICAL OTINIONS, TABLE-TALK, Etc. 161 NOTES 197 INTRODUCTION. In the month of June 1726 there appeared at Oxford and in London a small volume of criticism upon an important translation then recently published. The critic was Joseph Spence, a young clergyman, and Fellow of New College, Oxford : the book criticised was a no less important work than Pope's translation of the Odyssey ; and the criticism, which took the not altogether unusual form of a dialogue, was entitled an Essay on Pop^s Odyssey}- In itself, this essay is not a very notable performance, although its fairness and candour were considerably in advance of the criticism of the day. The writer was too much a gentleman to stoop to the petty vilification and abuse then popular among critics, while his keen poetic sense would not allow him to pass unreproved those faults which were, as a rule, lost sight of in the enthu- siasm of adulation. " His criticism," says Dr. Johnson,^ ^ An Essay on Pope's Odyssey: In which some particular Beauties and Blemishes of that work are considered. London and Oxford, 1726. The fly-leaf of the British Museum copy bears a MS. note stating that the book was published in June 1726. . * Lives of the Poets, Ed. Cunningham, iii. 350. viii INTRODUCTION. "was commonly just; what he thought, he thought rightly; and his remarks were recommended by his cool- ness and candour. In him Pope had the first experience of a critic without malevolence, who thought it as much his duty to display beauties as expose faults; who censured with respect and praised with alacrity." To Pope such criticism was naturally welcome : only once before had he been fortunate enough to meet a critic "who thought it as much his duty to display beauties as expose faults;" and with that critic he had, in an evil moment, quarrelled. Addison's review of the Art of Criti- cism^ — ^as Johnson should have remembered — exhibited anything but malevolence, and while it did not hesitate to condemn that "appetite to satire" which was Pope's most unpleasant characteristic, it generously and nobly acknowledged the beauties of what it justly called "a very fine poem." Pope's connection with the second critic was destined to be of a much more pleasant character. He met Spence, and their acquaintance rapidly ripened into that lifelong friendship of which the present volume is a more or less enduring monument. The Essay on Tope's Odyssey may or may not be what Dr. Warton called it — "a work of the truest taste." Its importance for us lies in the fact that it paved the way for one of the most memorable friendships of Pope's life. In what manner the poet first approached his critic cannot now with any degree of certainty be determined. ^ Spectator, No. 253, Dec. 20, 1711. INTH OD UCTION. ix It is probable, however, that the meeting was brought about by Spence's friend, Christopher Pitt. Pitt, a poet of no small ability, entered New College just a year before Spence. He came with a translation of Lucan in his pocket, and found that he had been anticipated in his task by Rowe. Naught discouraged, he at once set to work upon a version of Vida's De Arte Poetica, which was followed by the publication of a readable translation of the ^neid. The authorship of the Essay would be no secret to Pitt, and Pitt had already made the acquaint- ance of Pope. Dr. Young had handed the latter a trans lation of the twenty-third Odyssey made by Pitt, of which it appears the poet had sparingly availed himself. There exists a letter from Pitt to Spence, bearing date the i8th July 1726 — a month or so after the publication of the Essay — in which Spence is asked to advise Pitt whether he ought to publish this translation with his other verses or not. "Mr. Pope has used so little of the twenty-third Odyssey that I gave Dr. Young," he says, " that if I put it in among the re'st I shall hardly incur any danger of the penalty concerning the patent. However, I will not presume to publish a single line of it after Mr. Pope's translation if you advise me (as I desire you to do sin- cerely) to the contrary."^ Pitt evidently looked upon his friend Spence as a man well qualified to advise in any matter connected with Pope's translation of the Odyssey; and it is clear also that Pitt had been in communication ^ Courthope and Elwin's Pope, vol. x. p. 129. X INTRODUCTION. with Pope, if not (as is most probable) directly, at any rate through Dr. Young. Five days later we find Pope in direct communication with Pitt, thanking him for his translation of Vida's Art of Poetry, and complimenting him warmly upon it. It is clear to our minds that Christopher Pitt was the common friend who introduced the anecdotist, Spence, to his hero, Alexander Pope. To-day it seems somewhat strange that a lifelong friendship should be built upon so narrow a foundation as a favourable criticism. But in Pope's day an Essay like this which we are now considering was as remark- able as it was rare. Criticism as at present understood could scarcely be said to exist then. The writing which went by that name was either fulsome flattery or foul-mouthed abuse. At the one extreme were papers like those which Tickell contributed to the Guardian in praise of his friend, Ambrose Philips : at the other were pamphlets of the character of Pope's Narrative of the Frenzy off. Z>., and Cibber's two letters to Pope. Pope had received more than his fair share of abuse, and was at this time pulling himself together for that overwhelming attack upon his enemies which has made Grub Street a by-word among literary workers ever since. So that Spence's criticism came with an opportuneness which made it doubly welcome. Pope had profited by the lessons which his quarrel with Addison taught him ; he could now be grateful for praise, and at the same time acknowledge the justice of censure. Both affected him in a remarkable manner. Never from the days of Chaucer to the present time has there been a poet INTRODUCTION. xi more susceptible to criticism than he was. The faintest stroke wounded his vanity, and his resentment was undying. Praise him, and you made him your friend; blame him, and he was your lifelong enemy. Many examples might be cited in support of this assertion ; they are indeed so numerous and familiar that it is almost unnecessary to refer to them. It is sufficient simply to mention the names of Addison, Philips, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Theobald, and Colley Gibber; of Warburton and of Gay. Such being the case, it was the most natural thing in the world that the delighted poet should desire to make the acquaintance of the young Oxonian who had spoken so kindly of his translation. Whether that acquaintance would ripen into friendship or not depended entirely upon the temperament of one of them; and, as it happened, Spence was among the most companionable of men. He was a scholar, and could converse intelligently on all questions connected with scholarship and taste ; he was a literary man who was in no sense to be regarded as a rival; he was amiable in character and modest and gentle in behaviour. " Mr. Spence," said his friend Ghristopher Pitt, in a letter written about this time, " is the completest scholar, cither in solid or polite learning, for his years, that I ever knew. Besides, he is the sweetest tempered gentleman breathing."^ Shenstone, thirty years later, was equally charmed with Spence's amiability. " I have seen few," ^ Nichols' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century^ vol. viii. p. 98. xii INTRODUCTION. says he, " whom I Hked so much upon so Httle acquaint- ance as Mr. Spence ; extremely pohte, friendly, cheerful, and master of an infinite fund of subjects for agreeable conversation." Can we wonder then that Pope should have taken kindly to the gentle scholar who respected him so greatly, and who had shown that respect in so pleasant and agreeable a manner ? The year 1726 — the year in which Spence's Essay on Tope's Odyssey appeared — forms a landmark in the literary history of Alexander Pope. It marks the conclusion of his second period — the period of translating and editing — and the commencement of a third, which was to be divided between ethical epistles and satires. Pope was now acknowledged on every hand to be the greatest poet of his age. His Homer had been eminently successful, from the literary as well as the financial point of view j and he was now in receipt of an income which made him independent of booksellers, and allowed him to improve his villa and garden to his heart's content. A few lines about the Villa may fitly prelude the brief sketch of the poet's life which is to follow. Pope purchased the lease of a house at Twickenham in the spring of 17 18, about six months after his father's death; and, accompanied by his mother and his nurse, Mary Beach, left Chiswick, and moved into it shortly after- wards. At this time " it was simply a tiny building with the conventional parlour on either side of a stone-paved entrance hall, and bedrooms above to correspond. In front there was a pleasant little lawn sloping to the water; INTRODUCTION. xiii the back of the house looked upon the highway from London to Hampton Court. On the other side of this road stretched the garden, which was entered from the lawn by a sub-way. This garden was Pope's greatest delight. But the greatest glory of all was the so-called grotto. . . . This went beneath the road, and must, accord- ing to the plan, have also occupied some of the space below the house. Pope decorated it profusely with sparkling shells and minerals, to which collection all his friends contributed. . . . Over the entrance was a line from Horace ; and in the interior a spring that ' echoed through the cavern day and night.' When you looked through it from the house, you saw the sails on the shining Thames 'passing suddenly and vanishing;' if you looked the other way from the river, you saw the shell-temple and the multicoloured leafage of the wilderness ; if you shut it, it became a darkened chamber of wayward lights and mysterious scintillations."^ It was to this pleasant little villa on the banks of the Thames that Pope used to invite his friends. Hither came first and foremost honest Gay, the Devonian, ready to accept any man's hospitality, and doubly blest in partak- ing of that of his friend Pope. Swift, filled with saddest forebodings, came here in 1726, and sat alone "plodding upon a book," while Pope walked and courted the muse in his trim-kept lawns and grotto. Here possibly might come Bolingbroke, not much liked, we fancy, by the simple old ^ Alexander Pope. By Austin Dobson. Scrilners Magazine, May 1888. xiv INTR on UCTION. lady who sat at the head of the poet's table. Here certainly came Voltaire, and, if he is not belied, indulged in conversation of such a kind as to drive Mrs. Pope from the room. Lady Mary Wortley Montague lived for several years near at hand, and was doubtless in constant communication with the poet's household. The "fair-haired" Martha Blount was a regular visitor, and as years rolled on became more and more the supreme necessity of the poet's being. Oxford (father and son), Peterborough, Bathurst, and other noblemen were often visited by Pope, if indeed they did not deign to partake of his simple hospitality at the river-side villa. Into this brilliant circle of the great, the witty, and the wise was modest Joseph Spence intro- duced in 1726. No visitor was more welcome than he; and it was at Twickenham that he collected the anecdotes and fragments of table-talk which are contained within the covers of this volume. We must now glance for a moment at the life and poetical career of Pope. Alexander Pope was born in Lombard Street, London, on the 2 1 St of May 1688. His father, a wholesale linen merchant and a Roman Catholic, retired two years after the poet's birth to Binfield, on the skirts of Windsor Forest. There young Pope, after some irregular school education, particulars of which will be found in the Anecdotes^ settled down to self-tuition. Between the ages of twelve and twenty he read assiduously, and acquired, according to his own account, an extensive knowledge of French, Greek, and Latin. His knowledge might, as he says, be extensive, but it was at the same time superficial. Broome, who INTRODUCTION. xv assisted him in translating the Odyssey, accused him of ignorance of Greek, and Voltaire said he could not speak a word of French. His knowledge of the Latin language and literature was undoubtedly wide, but it was not that of a scholar. Pope's poetical talent showed itself early — " I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came," he says in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot ; and in 1709 he had written a series of four Pastorals, which, after winning in manuscript golden opinions from some of the leading critics and men of letters of the day, found publicity in the sixth part of Tonson's Miscellany. Meantime he had made the acquaintance of Sir William Trumbull, a Secretary of State under William III., and of Wycherley, a dramatist, whose literary vitality had exhausted itself in four grossly indecent comedies just thirty years before. Wycherley introduced the youthful genius to " knowing " Walsh, the critic, who counselled him to aim at becoming a " correct poet." Other friends made at this time were the Blounts of Mapledurham. The Pastorals were succeeded in 1 7 1 1 by the Essay on Criticism; and in 1712 the first sketch of the Rape of the Lock, the most brilliant occasional poem in our language, appeared in a Miscellany of Lintot. By this time Pope was recognised to be the foremost poet of the age : Steele eagerly accepted his Messiah for the Spectator, and asked for further contributions ; and he was retained to write the prologue to Addison's Cato. In 17 13 appeared Windsor Forest; and it was in this year also that he became acquainted with Swift. After publishing the Temple of xvi INTR OD UCTION. Fame and an enlarged version of the Rape of the Lock in 1 7 14, Pope embarked upon a task for which he had already made some preliminary studies — namely, a translation of Homer's Iliad. The commencement of this translation brings to a close the first, or " juvenile " period of Pope's literary career. Pope's second period extends from 1714 to 1727, and comprises thirteen years spent almost entirely upon the translation of the Iliad and Odyssey^ and the preparation of an unsuccessful edition of Shakespeare. He moved in April 1 7 16 with his parents to Chiswick, where he lived in what is now known as Mawson Row, and where his father died in 17 17. In 171 7 his poetical works, with two conspicuous additions — the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard — had become numerous enough to fill a handsome volume, which was issued by Tonson and Lintot, with a portrait of the author, engraved by Vertue after Jervas. Next year Pope settled with his mother at Twickenham. The last volume of the Iliad, dedicated to Congreve, came out in 1720; and, five years later, with the aid of two coadjutors, Elijah Fenton and William Broome, he fol- lowed it up by the first instalment of the Odyssey, which was completed in 1726. His edition of Shakespeare appeared in 1725. The third and last period of Pope's literary career was successively dominated by three different men. Swift directed the poet's genius into the congenial channel of satire; Bolingbroke caused him to versify an ethical INTRODUCTION. xvii system which he did not understand; and Warburton, breaking down the influence of Bolingbroke, substituted for it an equally potent one of his own. War was declared against the Dunces by the publication of the Treatise on Bathos m. the Miscellafu'es of 1727; and this was at once followed up by the first three books of the Dunciad (1728) and. the Grub Street Journal. Satire, mingled with dis- quisitions on ethical subjects, found expression in the Moral Essays (1731-35); ethics alone were dealt with in the Essay on Man (1732-34). In 1735, Curll, a piratical bookseller, published an edition of Pope's Correspondence, which was followed by an authorised edition in 1736. To tell the story of these editions fully would require a volume. Macaulay puts the truth plainly and bluntly when he says that Pope "robbed himself of his own letters, and then raised the hue and cry after them."^ What he did, in a word, is this. He surreptitiously supplied Curll with printed copies of his letters in 1735, and then turned round and denounced Curll's edition as a pirated one. With the object, as he said, of correcting many errors, he next year brought out an authorised edition, which, strange to say, differed in no material respect from Edmund Curll's. But, while the pirated and authorised editions were practically one and the same thing, both differed widely from the original letters which they professed to follow. Some letters — as recent investi- gations have shown — were made up of extracts from other ^ " Life and Writings of Addi.son." — Edinburgh KcvicM. July 1S43. xviii INTRODUCTION. letters ; many were wrongly dated ; some were even re- addressed to entirely different persons. As a matter of fact, Pope literally and deliberately engaged in " making history." In 1740 the poet became acquainted with Warburton, who suggested a new Dunciad in four books. This appeared in 1 742. Next year a new edition of this new Dunciad was published, in which Theobald was dethroned, and Colley Gibber made hero in his stead. Pope's mother died in 1733. Her son survived her until the 30th May 1744. He was buried in the middle aisle of Twickenham Church; where, seventeen years afterwards, Warburton, who had waited until he could write himself Episcopus Glocestriensis, erected the showy monument which has stood there ever since. The writer of the article on Spence's Anecdotes, which appeared in the Monthly Review for March 1820, censures Mr. Singer for providing so complete an account of the uneventful life of Joseph Spence. "We did not expect," says he, " and much less did we require, an elaborate bio- graphy of this amiable gentleman. A short and summary notice would have satisfied our curiosity concerning the incidents of a life which glided along unembellished by any high distinction and undiversified by any striking event. "^ As it happened, nearly all the facts of interest contained in Singer's memoir were taken from the second volume of Nichols' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, in which there appeared a pleasant little account of Spence, ^ Monthly Revieiv, vol. xci. INTR OD UCTION. xix founded upon information supplied by his friend Bishop Lowth. Singer padded this out with full accounts of Spence's three European tours, gleaned from papers and letters in his possession. In the present case, limits of space prevent any detailed biography; but it is by no means to be inferred that the story of Spence's life is not worth the telling. It is, on the contrary, full of salutary lessons for the present age of hurry and unrest. It was a life of learned leisure — one which has now become almost impossible. Spence, like the hero of one of Mr. Austin Dobson's poems, "... lived in that past Georgian day, When men were less inclined to say That ' Time is gold,' and overlay With toil their pleasure." His life was in its way an ideal one. He possessed suffi- cient culture to enjoy supreme literary art in others, while he could contemplate their triumphs without envy. He was fortunate in his friends, for the best and noblest in the land loved him. He never suffered, like Gay, from scarcity of money; nor, on the other hand, was he ever incon- venienced with too much. A relation who had intended to leave him six hundred a year died before she could carry her benevolent intention into effect ; and Spence was philo- sopher enough to regard his loss as an escape, quietly remarking that it might have made him idle and vicious to have been rendered independent at the age of fifteen. As XX INTRODUCTION. soon as he really wanted money, there came to him a Fellow- ship of New College, a little rectory in Essex, and the Professorship of Poetry. Later in life, his Polymetis proved a financial success, so that in the end Spence was possessed of an estate worth some nine hundred pounds a year. With this he was perfectly content. He might have obtained a mitre, had his ambition prompted him to solicit oneji but he valued leisure and peace of mind more than a bishopric. Even his nine hundred a year proved to be more than he wanted, and a considerable portion of it was applied to purposes of charity. His time was divided between travel, congenial studies, conversation, and acts of benevolence. He befriended every struggling poet and deserving writer that came in his way, as Thomson, Duck, Dodsley, Blacklock, and Robert Hill were proud to testify; and he watched over the declining years of his mother's life with a filial tenderness equalled only by that of his friend and hero, Pope. Last of all, he was felix opportunitate mortis. Death, swift and painless, came to him as he walked in his garden alone in the evening of life. It was an uneventful career truly which was thus ended ; but an enviable one, and one which will excuse the few details into which we are about to enter. Joseph Spence, the son of a clergyman of that name, was born at Kingsclere, Hants., on the 25th April 1699. He was educated at private schools, at Eton College (which he left for some reason now unknown), and at Winchester. ^ Tyers, A Historical Rhapsody on Mr. Pope. Quoted in Nichols' Lit. Anecdotes, vol. viii. p. 98. INTR OD UCTION. xxi From Winchester he proceeded, in 1720, to New College, Oxford, where he was elected Fellow in 1722. In 1724 he entered into Holy Orders; took his degree of Master of Arts in 1727; and was made Professor of Poetry, and Rector of Birchanger, in Essex, in 1728. It is by no means impossible that it was the Essay on Papers Odyssey, published in 1726, which first suggested to the University authorities the suitability of Spence to the post of Professor of Poetry. His scholarship and taste were held in high esteem by his contemporaries, and his amiability had won him many friends. It must be remembered also that the Oxford of 1728 was a very different university to that of to-day. It was the seat not of learning but of litigation — a place where "good letters decayed every day.''^ Only in such a university can we conceive it possible that a Professor should be allowed to absent himself from his duties in the manner that Spence did, for two or three years at a time.^ How ^ Social Life at the English Universities. By Christopher Words- worth, p. 57. ^ It is very probable that Edward Rolle acted as Spence's locum ienens at this time. In a letter sent to his mother from Dijon in the spring of 1731, Spence says — "Your being acquainted so well with my dear Deputy at Oxford (Cap : Rolle), and owning him for your son, in my absence, is just what I wished." The word " deputy " occurs again in a letter to Henry Rolle (of Stevenstone, North Devon), dated' the June following — "I wrote, the Lord knows how long ago, to know how to direct to you, by your cousin of New College and my good Deputy to the University of Oxford." — British Museum, Egerton MSS., 2234. xxi i INTR OD UCTION. far Pope helped the young professor, we do not know; but it is highly probable that he recommended him to the Dorset family. Spence had only been Professor of Poetry for two years when he received an invitation to accompany Charles, Earl of Middlesex (afterwards second Duke of Dorset), in a toi'r through France and Italy. He was, the invitation stated, to be companion, not governor. It was accepted, and Spence and his noble friend left England at the end of 1730. Before he went away, however, Spence found the opportunity and means — he never lacked the desire — to perform two of those little acts of kindness which have so often, fortunately, to be recorded in literary history. Thomson had come to London in 1725 with the proverbial poem in his pocket, and in shoes that very indifferently protected his feet from the weather. After the usual number of disappointments and delays, his rF/«/'l Epistle to Arbuthnot ; Curll publishes Pope's Corre- spo?idence 1735 Authorises edition of Corre- sp07idcnce 1736 Imitatiotts of Horace "^lyi Epilogue to Satires 173^ 1739 1742 New Dunciad (in four books) 1 742 - Dunciad (with Cibber as hero) Death of Pope Spence returns to England ; re-elected Poetry Pro- fessor Edition oi Gorboduc Second European Tour (Trevor) Returns to England Third and last Continental Tour (Lincoln) Returns to England 'Resigns Fellowship and living at Birchanger Presented to living of Great Horwood (Bucks) Elected Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1743 1744 1747 1749 1754! 1757 17521 1758J 1767 1768 Polymetis published Removes to Byfleet Becomes Prebend of Dur- ham Cathedral LifCy Character, and Poems of Blacklock Assists Hill, the Hebrew tailor Tours to the North Prepares Holdsworth's Vir- gil for the press Death of Spence (Aug. 20) ET" SPENCE'S ANECDOTES, OBSERVATIONS, AND CHARACTERS OF BOOKS AND MEN. PART I. GENERAL LITERARY ANECDOTES. SPENCE'S ANECDOTES. ADDISON. [Joseph Addison, prose writer and politician, was born in 1672. At Oxford he attracted the attention of the Whig leaders, Somers and Montague, who obtained for him a pension of ^300 to enable him to travel and prepare himself for the diplomatic service. When King William died his pension ceased, and he returned to England in 1703. Next year he celebrated Marlborough's victory at Blenheim in The Campaigit, for which he was rewarded by being made a Commissioner of Appeals in Excise. He became Under-Secretary of State in 1706, and in 1709 was appointed Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieu- tenant of Ireland, and Keeper of the Records in Ber- mingham's Tower, which offices he held until the Whig downfall of 1710. While Addison was in Ireland, Steele commenced the Tatler (April 12, 1709 — Jan. 2, 171 1), to which the former contributed forty-two papers. He also wrote for the Spectator (March I, 171 1 — Dec. 6, 1712), for the Guardian (March 12, 1713 — Oct. i, 1713), and for a revived Spectator, which appeared in 17 14. His tragedy Cato was produced with great success in 1713. Upon the death of Queen Anne, Addison's political 3 4 ADDISON, activity recommenced, and he successively became Secre- tary to the Lords Justices, Irish Secretary, one of the Commissioners for Trade, and finally, in 1717, a Secretary of State. He married the Countess of Warwick in 17 16; resigned his Secretary's place in 1718; and died in 1719. Besides sundry political pamphlets and Whig periodicals, Addison wrote verses in Latin and English, a Narrative of his travels in Italy (1705), Fair Rosamo?td, an opera (1706), and The Drummer, a comedy produced anony- mously in 17 1 5. His Dialogues on Medals and Evidences of Christianity were published posthumously.] Mr. Addison originally designed to have taken orders,-^ and was diverted from that design by being sent abroad in so encouraging a manner. It was from thence that he began to think of public posts, as being made Secretary of State at last, and sinking in his character by it, turned him back again to his first thought. He had latterly an eye toward the lawn, and it was then that he began his Evidences, of Christianity, and had a design of translating all the Psalms for the use of churches. Five or six of them that he did translate were published in the Spectators? — Pope. Old Jacob Tonson did not like Mr. Addison. He had a quarrel with him, and after his quitting the secretaryship used frequently to say of him : " One day or other you'll see that man a bishop ! I'm sure he looks that way; and, indeed, I ever thought him a priest in his heart."^ — P. Mr. Addison stayed above a year at Blois. He would rise as early as between two and three in the height of summer, and lie a bed till between eleven and twelve in the depth of winter. He was untalkative whilst here, and often thoughtful: ADDISON. 5 sometimes so lost in thought, that I have come into his room and stayed five minutes there before he has known anything of it. He had his masters generally at supper with him, kept very little company beside, and had no amour whilst here that I know of; and I think I should have known it if he had had any. — Abbe Philippeaux of Blots. I used formerly to like Mr. Addison's Letter from Italy extremely, and still like it the most of all his poems : even more than his " Campaign." — Pope. Mr. Addison did not go any depth in the study of medals : all the knowledge he had of that kind I believe he had from me ; and I did not give him above twenty lessons upon the subject. — Signor Ficoroni. I like his " Campaign," though so many speak against it. He was undoubtedly a very good poet ; but, after all, what will carry him down to posterity must be his prose writings. — Dr. Young. Mr. Addison was not a good-natured man, and very jealous of rivals. Being one evening in company with Philips,^ and the poems of " Blenheim " and the " Campaign " being talked of, he made it his whole business to run down blank-verse. Philips never spoke till between eleven and twelve o'clock, nor even then could do it in his own defence. It was at Jacob Tonson's ; and a gentleman in company ended the dispute by asking Jacob what poem he ever got the most by. Jacob immediately named Milton's " Paradise Lost." — Dr. Leigh, who had it from the gentle /nan who luas present. 6 ADDISON. It was the Marquis of Wharton who first got Addison a seat in the House of Commons, and soon after carried him down with him to Winchelsea. Addison was charmed with his son (afterwards Duke of Wharton), not only as his patron's son, but for the uncommon degree of genius that appeared in him. He used to converse and walk often with him. One day the little lord led him to see some of their fine running-horses. There were very high gates to the fields, and at the first of them his young friend fumbled in his pockets, and seemed vastly concerned that he could not find the key. Addison said 'twas no matter, he could easily climb over it. As he said this he began mounting the bars, and when he was on the very top of the gate the little lord whips out his key, and sets the gate a-swinging, and so for some time kept the great man in that ridiculous situation. — Dr. Young. Many of his Spectators he virrote very fast, and sent them to the press as soon as they were written. It seems to have been best for him not to have had too much time to correct. — Pope. The Spectators^ though there are so many bad ones among them, make themselves read still. All Addison's are allowed to be good, and many of Steele's. — AbbS Boileau, at Blots. Addison wrote the first four acts of his Cato abroad ;^ at least, they were written when I met him accidentally on his return at Rotterdam. — Tonson. [He wrote them all five at Oxford, and sent them from thence to Dryden, to my know- ledge. — Dr. Young.'] When Mr. Addison finished his Cato, he brought it to me, desired to have my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for ADDISON. 7 three or four days. I gave him my opinion sincerely, which was, " that I thought he had better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only printing it." This I said as thinking the lines well written, but the piece not theatrical enough. Some time after Mr. Addison said, "that his own opinion was the same with mine ; but that some particular friends of his, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted." And so it was, you know, with the greatest applause. — Pope. The love-part (in Cato) was flung in after, to comply with the popular taste ; and the last act was not written till six or seven years after, when he came home. — P. The love-part in Cato was certainly given to the taste of the times ; it is extremely cold and stiff. I believe he was so taken up with his chief character, which he has finished in so masterly a manner, that he neglected the subordinate parts. — Dr. Young, An audience was laid for the Distressed Mother; and when they found it would do it was practised again, yet more successfully for Cato.^ Lord Bolingbroke's carrying his friends to the house, and presenting Booth with a purse of guineas for so well representing the character of a person " who rather chose to die than see a general for life," was an acci- dental piece of good luck, and what carried the success of the play much beyond what they ever expected.' — Pope. My acquaintance with Mr. Addison commenced in 1712: I liked him then as well as I liked any man, and was very fond of his conversation. It was very soon after that Mr. Addison 8 ADDISON. advised me " not lo be content with the applause of half the nation." He used lo talk much and often to me of moderation in parties ; and used to blame his dear friend Steele for being too much of a party man. He encouraged me in my design of translating the Iliad, which was begun that year, and finished in 17 18. — P. Addison was very kind to me at first, but my bitter enemy afterwards. — P. He translated the first book of the Iltad that appeared as Tickell's; and Steele has blurted it out in his angry preface against Tickell.^ — P. Cibber confirmed to me Mr. Addison's character of bearing no rival, and enduring none but flatterers. And said that he translated the greater part of the first book of the Iliad pub- lished as Tickell's, and put it forth with a design to have overset Pope's. — Spence. There had been a coldness between Mr. Addison and me for some time,^ and we had not been in company together for a good while anywhere but at Button's coffee-house, where I used to see him almost every day. On his meeting me there, one day in particular, he took me aside, and said he should be glad to dine with me at such a tavern if I would stay till those people (Budgell and Philips) were gone. He abused those two gentlemen very much, and said he hoped that nobody could think that he esteemed 'em heartily. We went according!)', and after dinner Mr. Addison said, "that he had wanted for some time to talk with me; that his friend Tickell had formerly, whilst at Oxford, translated the first book of the Iliad. That ADDISON. 9 he now designed to print it, and had desired hhii to look it over; he must therefore beg that I would not desire him to look over my first book, because if he did, it would have the air of double-dealing." I assured him that I did not at all take it ill of Mr. Tickell that he was going to publish his translation; that he certainly had as much right to translate any author as my- self; and that publishing both was entering on a fair stage. I then added " that I would not desire him to look over my first book of the Iliad, because he had looked over Mr. Tickell's; but could wish to have the benefit of his observations on my second, which I had then finished, and which Mr. Tickell had not touched upon." Accordingly I sent him the second book next morning, and in a few days he returned it with very high commendation. Soon after it was generally known that Mr. Tickell was publishing the first book of the Iliad I met Dr. Young in the street, and upon our falling into that subject, the doctor expressed a great deal of surprise at Tickell's having such a translation by him so long. He said that it was inconceivable to him, and that there must be some mistake in the matter; that he and Tickell were so intimately acquainted at Oxford that each used to communicate to the other whatever verses they wrote, even to the least things ; that Tickell could not have been busied in so long a work there without his knowing something of the matter, and that he had never heard a single word of it till on this occasion. This surprise of Dr. Young, together with what Steele had said against Tickell in relation to this affair, make it highly probable that there was some underhand dealing in that business ; and indeed Tickell himself, who is a very fair, worthy man, has since in a manner as good as owned it to me. — Pope. [When it was introduced in conversation between Mr. Tickell and Mr. Pope by a third person, Tickell did not deny it; which, considering his honour lo ADDISON, and zeal for his departed friend, was the same as owning it.— Sj)encei\ Philips seemed to have been encouraged to abuse me, in coffee-houses and conversations. Gildon wrote a thing about Wycherley in which he had abused both me and my relations very grossly. Lord Warwick, who was but a weak man himself, told me one day "that it was in vain for me to endeavour to be well with Mr. Addison ; that his jealous temper would never admit of a settled friendship between us ; and to convince of what he had said, assured me that Addison had encouraged Gildon to publish those scandals, and had given him ten guineas after they were published." The next day, while I was heated with what I had heard, I wrote a letter to Mr. Addison to let him know " that I was not unacquainted with this behaviour of his ; that if I was to speak severely of him in return for it, it should not be in such a dirty way; that I should rather tell him himself fairly of his faults, and allow his good qualities ; and that it should be something in the following manner." I then subjoined the first sketch of what has been since called my satire on Addison. ^'^ He used me very civilly ever after, and never did me any injustice that I know of from that time to his death, which was about three years after. — P. [Dr. Trapp, who was by at the time of this conversation, said that he wondered how so many people came to imagine that Mr. Pope did not write this copy of verses till after Addison's death, since so many people, and he himself for one, had seen it in Addison's lifetime. — Spence^ Pope's character of Addison is one of the truest, as well as one of the best things he ever wrote, Addison deserved that character the most of any man. Yet how charming are his ADDISON. II prose writings ! He was as much master of humour as he was an indifferent poet. — Dr. Lockicr^ Dean of Peterborough. Mr. Pope was sorry that his verses on Addison ever got abroad; they occasioned him a great deal of trouble. — Lang. Steele had the greatest veneration for Addison, and used to show it in all companies, in a particular manner. Addison now and then used to play a little upon him, but he always took it well. — Pope. Addison used to speak often very slightingly of Budgell, "one that calls me cousin," "the man that stamped himself into my acquaintance," etc." — P. When somebody was speaking to Mr. Addison of Budgell's "Epilogue to the Distressed Mother," and said they wondered how so silly a fellow could blunder upon so good a thing, Addison said, " Oh, sir, it was quite another thing when first it was brought to me !"^^ — P. The worst step Addison ever took was his accepting the Secretary's place. He did it to oblige the Countess of War- wick, and to qualify himself to be owned for her husband.^' — P. He had thoughts of getting that lady from his first being recommended into the family. — Tonson. A fortnight before Addison's death, Lord Warwick came to Gay and pressed him in a very particular manner " to go and see Mr. Addison ;" which he had not done for a great while. Gay went, and found Addison in a very weak way. He received 1 2 ADDISON. him in the kindest manner, and told him " that he had desired this visit to beg his pardon ; that he had injured him greatly ; but that if he lived, he should find that he would make it up to him." Gay, on his going to Hanover, had great reason to hope for some good preferment — the present family had made strong promises to him — but all his views came to nothing. It is not impossible but that Mr. Addison might prevent them, from his thinking Gay too well with some of the great men of the former ministry. He did not at all explain himself in what he had injured him, and Gay could not guess at any- thing else in which he could have injured him so considerably. —Pope. Addison's chief companions before he married Lady War- wick (in 1716) were Steele, Budgell, Philips, Carey, Davenant, and Colonel Brett. He used to breakfast with one or other of them at his lodgings in Saint James's Place, dine at taverns with them, then to Button's, and then to some tavern again for supper in the evening ; and this was then the usual round of his life.— P. It was Dryden who made Will's coffee-house the great resort for the wits of his time. After his death, Addison transferred it to Button's, who had been a servant of his : they were opposite each other in Russell Street, Covent Garden.— P. Addison usually studied all the morning ; then met his party at Button's ; dined there, and stayed five or six hours ; and sometimes far into the night. I was of the company for about a year, but found it too much for me : it hurt my health, so I quitted it. — P. ADDISON. 13 Addison was so eager to be the first name, that he and his friend Sir Richard Steele used to run down even Dryden's character as far as they could. Pope and Congreve used to support it. — Tonsoft. Mr. Addison wrote very fluently : but he was sometimes very slow and scrupulous in correcting. He would show his verses to several friends ; and would alter almost everything that any of them hinted at as wrong. He seemed to be too diffident of himself; and too much concerned about his character as a poet : or (as he worded it) too solicitous for that kind of praise which, God knows, is but a very little matter after all! "I wonder then why his letter to Sache- verell was published.?"^* That was not published till after his death, and I daresay he would not have suffered it to have been printed had he been living ; for he himself used to speak of it as a poor thing. He wrote it when he was very young ; and as such, gave the characters of some of our best poets in it only by hearsay. Thus his character of Chaucer is dia- metrically opposite to the truth ; he blames him for want of humour. The character he gives of Spenser is false too ; and I have heard him say that he never read Spenser till fifteen years after he wrote it. — Poj)e. Mr. Addison would never alter anything after a poem was once printed ; and was ready to alter almost everything that was found fault with before. I believe he did not leave a word unchanged that I made any scruple against in his Cato. — P. [The last line in that tragedy originally, " And oh, 'twas this that ended Cato's life." ih AtiiHifHNim 'liig iHUg (:R[»y i^ wfm OR l^UH^H hiuI WhisfoH, in tlj# (hjfd ArkHltMH^ »»f*t, ((*'' ktli^-" ^nfivt tj»^f*(ly ih •'Mm*^ j^af.- A7 ■A A M ^<e* */j>f^j^/r'^/. * ' ■ ^'/f fifM f'^ ■■"' - ■■■■ 1 6 ARBUTHNOT. — It was from a part of these memoirs that Dr. Swift took his first hints for Gulliver. There were pigmies in Schriebler's travels ; and the projects of Laputa. — The design was carried on much farther than has appeared in print ; and was stopped by some of the gentlemen being dispersed or otherwise engaged (about the year 17 15). See the memoirs themselves. — Pope. The piece to prove that all learning was derived from the Monkeys in Ethiopia was written by me, and (I think he added) Dr. Arbuthnot. It made part of the Memoirs of Scriblerus. The design of it was to ridicule such as build general assertions upon two or three loose quotations from the ancients. — P. The little copy ot verses on Ditton and Whiston, in the third volume of the Miscellanies, was written by Gay ; that on Dennis, by myself; and the Origin of the Sciences from the Monkeys in Ethiopia, by me. Dean Parnell, and Dr. Arbuthnot. —P. Upon some lady complaining of the sufferings of women, Dr. Arbuthnot said, " Yes, the ladies suffer greatly in some par- ticulars, but there is not one of you that undergo the torture of being shaved three times a week," — Mallet. ATTERBURY. [Francis Atterbury was born in 1662. At Oxford he defended the Reformation against the attacks of the notorious Obadiah Walker, and opposed Bentley in the famous controversy which raged around the forged Letters of Phalaris. He entered into Holy Orders in 1687, and in 1713 was made Bishop of Rochester and Dean of West- minster. He sympathised strongly with the exiled Stuarts, and in 1717 began to hold direct communication with the Jacobites abroad. Upon the discovery of the Jacobite conspiracy of 1722 it was found that the Bishop of Rochester had been mixed up in it, and he was sent to the Tower. He was subsequently tried, condemned, and banished. He left England in the summer of 1723, and died in exile in 1732.] Upon the death of the queen (Anne), Ormond, Atterbury, and Lord Marshal held a private consultation together, in which Atterbury desired the latter to go out immediately, and pro- claim the Pretender in form. Ormond, who was more afraid of consequences, desired to communicate it first to the Council. — " Damn it, sir," said Atterbury in a great heat (for he did not value swearing), "you very well know that things have not been concerted enough for that yet, and that we have not a moment to lose." — Indeed it was the only thing they could have done : such a bold step would have made people believe that they were stronger than they really were, and might have 17 712 1 8 ATTERBURY. taken strangely.— The late king/ I am fully persuaded, would not have stirred a foot, if there had been a strong opposition : indeed, the family did not expect this crown ; at least, nobody in it but the old Princess Sophia.— Z>/-. Lockier, Dean of Peterborough. When Atterbury was in the Tower, upon its being said in the drawing-room, "What shall we do with the man?" Lord Cadogan answered, " Fling him to the lions," The bishop was told of this : and soon after, in a letter to Mr. Pope, said that he had fallen upon some verses in his room, which he must copy out for him to read. These were four extremely severe lines against Lord Cadogan : and in the last, in particular, he called him "A bold, bad, blundering, blustering, bloody booby." —Pope. I never could speak in public : and I don't believe that if it was a set thing, I could give an account of any story to twelve friends together, though I could tell it to any three of them with a great deal of pleasure. — When I was to appear for the Bishop of Rochester, in his trial, though I had but ten words to say, and that on a plain point (how that bishop spent his time whilst I was with him at Bromley), I made two or three blunders in it : and that notwithstanding the first row of lords (which was all I could see) were mostly of my acquaintance. —P. The Bishop of Rochester's speech, as it is printed, could not be as he spoke it. I was there all the while. Both the bishop and myself minded the time ; when he began, and when he left off. He was two hours in speaking it ; and, as it is printed, you ATTERBURY. 19 can't well be above an hour reading it. — "Was not there an act of parliament read in the midst of it?" — No, I don't remember that there was : but he was indulged to sit down for two or three minutes, to rest himself a little between the speaking. — P. BETTERTON. [Thomas Betterton, " the Roscius of his age," was born at Westminster, in or about the year 1635. ^i^ ^^^S ^"d honourable career as actor is closely associated with the history of the drama from the Restoration up to within a few years of the death of Queen Anne. His versatility was practically unlimited, and it has been estimated that he "created" no fewer than one hundred and thirty characters. He was also a dramatist, and not unskilfully adapted several of the plays in which he took part. He was, moreover, largely responsible for the introduction of scenery on the English stage. Betterton married in 1662 Mrs. Sanderson, an actress, who survived him. He made his last appearance on the stage 25th April 1710, when he acted Melantius in the Alaid's Tragedy at his own benefit. He died three days afterwards.] I was acquainted with Betterton from a boy. — Pope, — Yes, I really think Betterton the best actor I ever sawj but I ought to tell you, at the same time, that in Betterton's days the older sort of people talked of Harte's being his superior, just as we do of Betterton's being superior to those now. — P. Dryden, in his " Spanish Fryar," speaking of the bad titles of kings growing good by time, had said — i BETTER TON. 21 " So when clay's buried for a hundred years, It starts forth china." Betterton found fault with it, as mean, and Dryden omitted it — Dr. Trappy from Betterton. Archbishop Tillotson was very well acquainted with Better- ton ; and continued that acquaintance, even after he was in that high station. One day, when Betterton came to see him at Lambeth, the prelate asked him " how it came about, that after he had made the most moving discourse that he could, was touched deeply with it himself, and spoke it as feelingly as he was able ; yet he could never move people in the church near so much as the other did on the stage?" — That, says Betterton, I think, is easy to be accounted for : it is because you are only telling them a story, and I am showing them facts.^— P. BOLINGBROKE. [Henry St. John, " the glory and the shame both of our history and of our literature," was born at Battersea in 1678. Educated privately, and at Eton, he spent several years on the Continent, returning to England in 1700. Next year he entered Parliament, and attached himself to the Tory party. From 1704 to 1707 he was Secretary of War, and he was made Secretary of State in 17 10. The death of Queen Anne brought about the downfall of the Tories, and St. John (now Viscount Bolingbroke) escaped to France to avoid a prosecution for treason, and was attainted. He was at the bottom of the ill-fated rising of 1715, the non-success of which led to his dismissal by the Pretender, and terminated his connection with the Jacobites. He remained in exile until 1723, when he was restored to his property and right of inheritance, but not to the House of Lords. It was Bolingbroke who consolidated and directed the strenuous opposition encountered byWalpole: it was he also who contributed the most effective papers to the C?-af/s)nan. He wrote (among other pieces) Reflections 07i Exile, Remarks on the History of England, A Dissertation upoti Parties, a Letter 07i the true Use of Study and Retirement, and a Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism. His Letters on the Study of History appeared in 1735, and the Ldea of a Patriot King in 1749. The remarkable ascendency which Bolingbroke gained over the mind of Pope bore fruit in the Essay on Man : he likewise pro- foundly impressed the philosophy and writings of Voltaire. He died in 1751.] BOLINGBROKE. 23 Lord Bolingbroke is one of the politest as well as greatest men in the world. He appeared careless in his talk of religion. In this he differed from Fenelon : Lord Bolingbroke outshines you, but then holds himself in, and reflects some of his own light, so as to make you appear the less inferior to him. The archbishop never outshone ; but would lead you into truths in such a manner that you thought you discovered them yourself. — Ramsay. Lord Bolingbroke will be more known to posterity as a writer and philosopher than as a statesman. He has several things by him that he will scarce publish ; and a good deal that he will. — Pope. [He at the same time spoke very highly of his Dissertation on the English History, and that on Parties : and called him " absolutely the best writer of the age." He mentioned then, and at several other times, how much (or rather how wholly) he himself was obliged to him for the thoughts and reasonings in his moral work ; and once in particular said, that beside their frequent talking over that subject together, he had received, I think, seven or eight sheets from Lord Bolingbroke in relation to it, as I appre- hended by way of letters ; both to direct the plan in general, and to supply the matter for the particular epistles. — SpenceJ\ Lord Bolingbroke wrote the long inscription on the column set up in honour of the Duke of Marlborough, at Blenheim. " I own I should have thought that too stiiT for so fine and easy a writer as Lord Bolingbroke." " What may seem too stiff to you in it is from that Lord's imitating the best old inscription style on that occasion." — P. 24 BOLINGBROKE. Lord Bolingbroke is something superior to anything I have seen in human nature. You know I don't deal much in hyperboles : I quite think him what I say. — P. Lord Bolingbroke is much the best writer of the age. Nobody knows half the extent of his excellencies but two or three of his most intimate fri°nds. Whilst abroad he wrote "A Consolation to a Man in Exile," so much in Seneca's style, that, was he living now among us, one should conclude that he had written every word of it. He also wrote several strictures on the Roman affairs (something like what Montes- quieu published afterwards), among which there were many excellent observations. — P. "Does Lord Bolingbroke understand Hebrew?" No; but he understands that sort of learning, and what is wrote about it. — P. Lord Bolingbroke is not deep either in pictures, statues, or architecture. — P. [I had been asking him what that Lord's opinion was of the Achilles' Story among the sculpture at Cardinal Polignac's, and he said Lord B. spoke but lowly of them. — SpenceJ] Lord Bolingbroke's usual toast after dinner is : "To Friend- ship and liberty." I should like to have it for a motto to my door with an S added after it (AMICITI^ ET LIBER- TATI S,).—Pope. There is one thing in Lord Bolingbroke which seems peculiar to himself. He has so great a memory as well as judgment, that if he is alone, and without books, he can set down by himself, and refer to the books, or such a particular BOLINGBROKE. 25 subject in them, in his own mind, and write as fully on it as another man would with all his books about him. He sits like an Intelligence, and recollects all the question within himself. — P. Lord Bolingbroke quitted the Pretender, because he found him incapable of making a good prince. He himself, if in power, would have made the best of ministers. These things will be proved one of these days. The proofs are ready, and the world will see them. — P. " I really think there is something in that great man (Lord Bolingbroke) which looks as if he was placed here by mistake." There is so; and when the comet appeared to us a month or two ago I had sometimes an imagination that it might possibly be come to our world to carry him home, as a coach comes to one's door for other visitors. — P. Lord Bolingbroke, in everything, has been acting for the good of the public for these twenty-five years, and without any view to his own interest. Where he could get nothing by it, he has laid out much more money than those who were principally concerned, and could better afford it. In the single point of intelligence in the affair of Dunkirk, and about that time, he was at the expense of four thousand pounds, when the other principal men that I could name, who could better afford it, did not expend above five hundred pounds. — P. [He had been speaking of Sir William Windham and Pulteney. — Spencel\ Lord Bolingbroke's father said to him on his being made a lord, "Ah, Harry, I ever said you would be hanged, but now I find you will be beheaded." — Dr. Young. 26 BOLINGBROKE. Lord Bolingbroke's "Occasional Writer" (the first stroke in his long-continued pursuit against Walpole) is one of the best things he ever wrote. — Dr. Warburton, I have heard him speak of some work of Lord Bolingbroke's which that lord designed to suppress.^ He spoke of it as too valuable to the world to be so used, and said he would not suffer it to be lost to it. She had immediately the same thought relating to that affair that I had, and said "she could take her oath it was done out of his excessive esteem for the writer and his abilities: but what signifies my words or thoughts of that matter? Mr. Pope was apt to be duped into too high or too good an opinion of people, from the goodness of his own heart, and his general humanity." — Mrs. Blount, May i8, 1749. I have a letter of Lord Bolingbroke's by me, in which he speaks of Mr. Pope as one of the greatest and the best of men. — Mrs. B. When the Prince of Wales was at Mr. Allen's, near Bath, on seeing a picture of Mr. Pope, he mentioned the circum- stance of his printing those pieces by Lord Bolingbroke, and said he supposed he was not in any fault in doing it. Dr. Warburton, who was present, showed, in part, that he was not; what he said was strengthened by Mr. Allen, and allowed to be just by Lord Bathurst, who came with the prince. In the original copy of those pieces there were some things very severe on the king, which Mr. Pope, in concert with Lord B., omitted when they were printed : but he omitted nothing but what was agreed to, and inserted nothing. — Dr. Warburfon. BOLINGBROKE. 27 Pope was much shocked at overhearing Warburlon and Hooke talking of Lord BoHngbroke's disbelief of the moral attributes of God. "You must be mistaken," said he. Pope afterwards talked with Lord B, about it, and he denied it all. Some time after Pope told his friends of it with great joy, and said, " I told you, I was sure you must be mistaken." — Dr. IV. (He mentioned this as a proof of Mr. Pope's excessive friendli- ness to Bolingbroke.) Lord B * * * * was overcome with terrors and excessive passion in his last illness. After one of his fits of passion he was overheard by Sir Henry Mildmay complaining to himself and saying, " What will my poor soul undergo for all these things ? "—Dr. W. It is a very easy thing to devise good laws : the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws ; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue. — Lord Bolingbroke. As to our senses, we are made in the best manner that we possibly could. If we were so formed as to see into the most minute configuration of a post, we should break our shins against it. We see for use, and not for curiosity. Was our sight so fine as to pierce into the internal make of things, we should distinguish all the fine ducts and the contrivances of each canal for the conveyance of the juices in every one of those leaves : but then we should lose this beautiful prospect : it would be only a heap and confusion to the eye. — B. 28 BOLINGBROKE. Cudworth in Theological Metaphysics, Locke in proper Metaphysics, and Newton in Physics, are read as the first books of their kind in several foreign universities. The character of our best English writers gets ground abroad very much of late. — B. Lord Bacon, in his Novum Organum^ has laid down the whole method that Descartes afterwards followed. — B. Dryden has assured me that he got more from the Spanish critics alone than from the Italian and French and all other critics put together. Just before I went to Utrecht I learnt the Spanish language in three weeks' time : so as to be able to read and answer letters. — B. The editorial criticism was very useful and necessary in Erasmus and the earlier revivers of learning ; but the carrying it on without mercy by the later critics has only served to puzzle the text. — B. After all, it is Nicholas the Fifth to whom Europe is obliged for its present state of learning. — B. At Paris they have a stated set of paradoxical orations.^ The business of one of these was to show that the history of Rome for the four first centuries was all a mere fiction. The person engaged in it proved that point so strongly and so well that several of the audience, as they were coming out, said those who had proposed that question played booty; and that it was so far from a paradox that it was a plain and evident truth. — B. I BOLINGBROKE. 29 We have had a new set of motives and principles all over Europe since the Pyrenean treaty ; so that the only part even of our own history necessary to be thoroughly studied now does not go a great way back. This is the opinion of Lord Bolingbroke, who knows more of Europe than perhaps all Europe put together at present. — P. 'Tis no matter what the world says of us. If a man is sensible that he has always acted for the good of his country, he may always lay down his head with pleasure on his pillow : and this is the great satisfaction that I enjoy, and have always enjoyed, amidst all that has been said against me. — Lofd Bolingbroke, May 1744. SHEFFIELD, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. [John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, was the son of Edmund, Earl of Mulgrave, and was born in 1649. He wrote some miscellaneous poems, an Essay on Satire^ and an Essay on Poetry. In the former he was assisted by Dryden, and in the latter by Pope. He died in 1721.] Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham's famous essay has certainly been cried up much more than it deserves, though corrected a good deal by Dryden. It was this which set him up for a poet ; and he resolved to keep up that character, if he could, by any means, fair or foul. Could anything be more impudent than his publishing that satire, for writing which Dryden was beat in Rose Alley^ (and which was so remarkably known by the name of the " Rose Alley Satire "), as his own ? He made, indeed, a few alterations in it first, but these were only verbal, and generally for the worse. — Lockier. Mr. Pope altered some verses in the Duke of Buckingham's Essay 07t Poetry j as he likewise did many in Wycherley's poems. — Pope. The Duke of Buckingham was superficial in everything; even in poetry, which was his ybr/. — P. 30 VILLIERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. [George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was born in 1627. He was the son of the first duke, the favourite and minister of James I. and Charles I. He lost his estates as a royalist, but recovered them by his marriage with the daughter of Lord Fairfax. He ridiculed Dryden as Bayes in the burlesque play of the Rehearsal^ which was pro- duced at the Theatre Royal, December 7, 1671. Dryden revenged himself by the character of Zimri in Absalom and Achiiophel {i6%i), and under this name described the duke as — *' A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome. Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong ; Was everything by starts and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon." Buckingham died in 1687.] The witty Duke of Buckingham was an extreme bad man. His duel with Lord Shrewsbury was concerted between him and Lady Shrewsbury. All that morning she was trembling for her gallant, and wishing the death of her husband ; and, after his fall, 'tis said the duke slept with her in hi& bloody shirt. — Pope. 3. / 32 VILLI ERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. The Rehearsal (one of the best pieces of criticism that ever was), and Butler's inimitable poem of Hudibras^ must be quite lost to the readers in a century more, if not soon well commented. Tonson has a good key to the former, but refuses to print it, because he had been so much obliged to Dryden. — Lockier. In one of Dryden's plays there was this line, which the actress endeavoured to speak in as moving and affecting a tone as she could — " My wound is great, because it is so small ! " and then she paused and looked very much distressed. The Duke of Buckingham, who was in one of the boxes, rose from his seat, and added, in a loud, ridicuHng voice — " Then 'twould be greater were it none at all ! " which had so strong an effect upon the audience (who before were not very well pleased with the play) that they hissed the poor woman off the stage; would never bear her appearance in the rest of her part ; and (as this was the second time only of the play's appearance) made Dryden lose his benefit night. — L. Nathaniel Lee was Fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge.^ The Duke of Buckingham (Villiers) brought him up to town, where he never did anything for him; and that, I verily believe, was one occasion of his running mad. He was rather before my time, but I saw him in Bedlam. I think he died about the time of the Revolution. — L. VILLI ERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. 33 That Duke of Buckingham was reckoned the most accom- plished man of the age in riding, dancing, and fencing. When he came into the presence chamber it was impossible for you not to follow him with your eye as he went along, he moved so gracefully. He got the better of his vast estate, and died between two common girls at a little alehouse in Yorkshire.^ It is incredible what pains he took with one of the actors to teach him to speak some passages in Bays' part, in the Rehearsal^ right. The vulgar notion of that play's being hissed off the stage the first night is a mistake. — Z, / 713 GIBBER. [COLLEY CiBBER, actor and dramatist, was born in 167 1. He joined the united companies at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1690, appearing as Sir Gentle's servant in Southerne's Sir Anthony Love in 1691. In January 1696 was produced his comedy, Lov^s Last Shift, or the Fool i7i Fashion, in which he played Sir Novelty Fashion, and to which Vanbrugh wrote a sequel, The Relapse. As actor. Gibber appeared in a remarkably long list of characters, while as dramatist he wrote, or adapted, no less than thirty plays. He was made Poet-Laureate in 1730, retired from the stage in 1733, and published the well-known Apology for his life in 1740. He died in 1757.] Mr. Pope said — " The story invented by Gibber was an absolute lie^ as to the main point. He was invited by Lord W. to pass an evening with him, and was carried by him, .with Gibber and another, to a bagnio ; but nothing happened of the kind that Gibber mentions, to the best of my memory, and I had so few things of that kind ever on my hands, that I should have scarce forgot so material a circumstance." — Pope. I could give a more particular account of Mr. Pope's health than perhaps any man. Gibber's slander (of a carnosity) is false. He had been gay, but left that way of life upon his acquaintance with Mrs. B. — Mr. Cheselden. 34 CIBBER. 35 " I am for the church, though I don't go to church " (said he), to illustrate his loving virtue in a play, etc., though he did not practise it. — Cibber. On hearing the "Fair Foundling" read, he excused himself for finding such little faults because there were no great ones in it : he called it immoderately good, and said he had not seen so good a play these fifteen years. — C. Old Gibber's brother, at Winchester College, in Doctor Young's time, vv^as reckoned ingenious as well as loose; his conduct was so immoral that even Colley used to reprove him. His varying at school, " Quam pulchrum est digito monstrari et dicier hie est ; Hie mihi quam moeste vox sonat illefuit." He vi^as a vile rake afterwards, and in the greatest distress; Colley used to reprove him for it. He told Dr. Sim. Burton, on a visit, " that he did not know any sin he had not been guilty of but one, which was avarice; and if the doctor would give him a guinea, he would do his utmost to be guilty of that too." — Dr. Young. COWLEY. [Abraham Cowley was the posthumous son of a London stationer, and was born in 1618. At school — he was sent to Westminster as a king's scholar — he was precocious in the highest degree, and wrote readable verses at the age often. Five of his poems appeared, in a volume bearing the title Poetical Blossoms^ in 1633. He went to Cambridge in 1637, and while there wrote Love's Riddle^ a pastoral drama; Nauftagiuvi Joculare, a Latin comedy; The Guardian, a comedy (afterwards re-written and played as Cutter of Coleman Street in 1661), and portions of the Davideis, afterwards published as an unfinished epic. Ejected from Cambridge in the spring of 1644, Cowley went to Oxford, where he became acquainted with the Royalist leaders. He went with Queen Henrietta Maria to France, and was employed in diplomatic business by the exiled Court for several years. The Mistress, a collection of love poems, appeared in 1647; a collected edition of his works, including the Pindarique Odes, in 1647, and A Discourse by way of Vision concerning the Government of Oliver Croimvell in 166 1. Cowley is said to have been disappointed at not receiving preferment at the hands of Charles H., and the rest of his life was passed (as he professed to desire) in retirement. At this time he wrote the Essays by which he is now chiefly remembered. He died in 1667.] When Cowley grew sick of the Court, he took a house first at Battersea, then at Barnes, and then at Chertsey : always farther COWLEY. 37 and farther from town. In the latter part of his life he showed a sort of aversion for women, and would leave the room when they came in : 'twas probably from a disappointment in love. He was much in love with his Leonora,^ who is mentioned at the end of that good ballad of his on his different mistresses. She was married to Dean Sprat's brother, and Cowley never was in love with anybody after. — Pope. Cowley's allowance was at last not above three hundred a year. He died at Chertsey ;^ and his death was occasioned by a mean accident whilst his great friend, Dean Sprat, was with him on a visit there. They had been together to see a neigh- bour of Cowley's, who (according to the fashion of those times) made them too welcome. They did not set out for their walk home till it was too late ; and had drank so deep that they lay out in the fields all night. This gave Cowley the fever that carried him off. The parish still talk of the drunken Dean.*— P. Cowley is a fine poet, in spite of all his faults. He, as well as Davenant, borrowed his metaphysical style from Donne. Sprat a worse Cowley. — P. What a run had Cowley's verses for about thirty years ; the editions are innumerable. There has been no edition now for this long time. He is no master of versification. — Mr. Harte. D'AVENANT. [Sir William D'Avenant was the son of a vintner, who kept the Crown tavern at Oxford, and was born in 1606. During the reign of Charles I. he wrote several tragedies, a comedy, and two masques ; and he succeeded Ben Jonson as poet-laureate in 1638. He fought for the king in the civil war, and was knighted by him at the siege of Gloucester in 1643. ^^ 1650 Queen Henrietta Maria despatched him from France on a mission to Virginia, to carry to the colony a number of persons who might be of service to it in the trouble it was then experiencing. He was captured by a Parliament ship, confined in Cowes Castle, and narrowly escaped hanging. From Cowes he was transferred to the Tower, and while there he published Gondibert (165 1). Towards the end of Cromwell's Pro- tectorate, D'Avenant was permitted to give dramatic entertainments, and accordingly, in 1656, he represented The Siege of Rhodes^ with scenery and music. This was practically the first opera produced in England; it was the first play in which scenery was employed, and it introduced the first woman that ever appeared upon the English stage. After the Restoration, D'Avenant had a regular company of players, who acted at a theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, built in 1662. He died there in 1668, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.] That notion of Sir William Davenant being more than a poetical child only of Shakespeare was common in town ; and 38 D'AVENANT. 39 Sir William himself seemed fond of having it taken for tiuth.^ —Pope. Shakespeare, in his frequent journeys between London and his native place, Stratford-upon-Avon, used to lie at Davenant's, the Crown, in Oxford. He was very well acquainted with Mrs. Davenant, and her son (afterwards Sir William) was supposed to be more nearly related to him than as a godson only. One day when Shakespeare was just arrived, and the boy sent for from school to him, a head of one of the colleges (who was pretty well acquainted with the affairs of the family) met the child running home, and asked him whither he was going in so much haste? The boy said, " To my godfather, Shakespeare." " Fie, child," says the old gentleman, " why are you so super- fluous ? Have you not learned yet that you should not use the name of God in vain?" — P. Sir W^illiam Davenant's " Gondibert" is not a good poem, if you take it on the whole; but there are a great many good things in it. He is a scholar of Donne's, and took his senten- tiousness and metaphysics from him. — P. The burlesque prologue to one of Sir William Davenant's plays began with this couplet — " You who stand sitting still to hear our play, Which we to-night present you here to-day." DORSET. [Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, was born in 1637. Having been educated under a private tutor, he travelled into Italy, returning to England a little before the Restora- tion. After spending several years at Court, where he was a great favourite of Charles II., Sackville attended the Duke of York as volunteer in the Dutch War, and was present at the English victory off Lowestoft, in June 1665. It was here, on the day before the battle, that he wrote the famous song, " To all you ladies now at land." He became Earl of Dorset on the death of his father in 1677 ; con- curred in the Revolution of 1688, and died in 1706.] Lord Dorset used to say of a very good-natured dull fellow, '"Tis a thousand pities that man is not ill-natured! that one might kick him out of company." — Pope. Lord Dorset's things are all excellent in their way, for one should consider his pieces as a sort of epigrams : wit was his talent. He and Lord Rochester should be considered as holiday-writers ; as gentlemen that diverted themselves now and then with poetry, rather than as poets. — P. [This was said kindly of them ; rather to excuse their defects, than to lessen their characters. — Spence.'\ Donne had no imagination, but as much wit, I think, as any writer can possibly have. Oldham is too rough and coarse. 40 DORSET. 41 Rochester is the medium between him and the Earl of Dorset. Lord Dorset is the best of all those writers. " What I better than Lord Rochester?" Yes, Rochester has neither so much delicacy or exactness as Lord Dorset. — P. [He instanced from Lord Rochester's Satire on Man. — Spence^ That very hot copy of verses against King William and Queen Mary, in this volume of the State Poems* was written by the famous Mr. Manwaring, though he was so great a Whig afterwards on his acquaintance with Lord Hallifax. "Are not there several of Lord Dorset's pieces in these 5/), and The Man of the Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter {1676). He was married and made a knight between 1676 and 1680. In 1685 he was appointed English Resident at Ratisbon. He died in 1691. William Congreve was bom in 1670. He wrote four comedies : The Old Bachelor (1693), The Double Dealer {i6()2)), Love for Love {i6()^), The Way of the World {1700), and one tragedy, The Mourniftg Bride, produced in 1697. Congreve, Hke Vanbrugh, unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself against Jeremy Collier's spirited attack upon him in the Short View (1698). He died in 1729. Sir John Vanbrugh (1666-1726) was an architect as well as a playwright. He built Blenheim, and wrote several successful comedies, chief among which are The Relapse, or. Virtue in Dajiger (1697), The Provoked Wife (1697), and The Cofifederacy (1705). He was knighted towards the end of his life, and died in 1726. George Farquhar, actor, soldier, and dramatist, was born in 1678. He wrote Love and a Bottle (1698), The Cotistant Couple (1700), The Recruiting Officer (1706), and The Beaux Stratagem (1707). He died soon after this, his last and best comedy, was put upon the stage.] ETHEREDGE, CONGREVE, ETC. 49 None of our writers have a freer, easier way for comedy than Etherege and Vanbrugh. " Now we have named all the best of them," (after mentioning those two, Wycherley, Congieve, Fletcher, Jonson, and Shakespeare). — Mr. Pope. Sir George Etherege was as thorough a fop as ever I saw; he was exactly his own Sir Fopling Flutter. And yet he designed Dorimant, the genteel rake of wit, for his own picture. — Dr. Lockier^ Dean of Peterborough. "Ay, Mr. Tonson, he was ultimus Romanorum^' (with a sigh). Speaking of poor Mr. Congreve, who died a year or two before. — Pope, Garth, Vanbrugh, and Congreve were the three most honest-hearted, real good men of the poetical members of the kit-cat club. — Pope a?id Tonson. Congreve was very intimate for years with Mrs. Brace- girdle,^ and lived in the same street, his house very near hers, until his acquaintance with the young Duchess of Marlborough.^ He then quitted that house. The Duchess showed me a diamond necklace (which Lady Di. used after- wards to wear) that cost seven thousand pounds, and was purchased with the money Congreve left her. How much better would it have been to have given it to poor Mrs. Bracegirdle. — Dr. Young. Sir John Vanbrugh left only a sketch of the "Journey to London " ; how much Gibber did appears by the dmuche printed. — Cibber. 714 so ETHEREDGE, CONGREVE, ETC. Considering the manner of writing then in fashion, the purity of Sir John Suckling's style is quite surprising. — Lockier. [He spoke of Farquliar, at the same time, as a mean poet, and as placed by some in a higher rank than he deserved. Mr, Pope always used to call Farquhar a farce-writer.'] Farquhar died young : he improved in each play ; his last was the best. Had he lived, he would probably have made a very good writer that way. — Oldisworth. FENTON AND BROOME. [Elijah Fenton was born in 1683. He assisted Pope in the translation of the Odyssey (the first, fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth books being allotted to him), and wrote a tragedy, Manamne, successfully produced in 1723. He died in 1730. William Broome (1689-1745) also assisted Pope with the Odyssey. He translated eight books (the second, sixth, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty- third), and prepared all the notes.] Fenton is a right honest man. He is fat and indolent, a very good scholar, sits within and does nothing but read or compose. —Pope. Fenton has another play on the stocks. He was angry before Broome. They two had resolved on translating the Odyssey; Mr. Pope hearing of it, immediately said that he would make a third. At last he came to be principal in the work. Fenton had two hundred and forty pounds of him, and Broome six hundred.^ Broome asked five, and upon Mr. Pope saying that was too little, and Broome naming seven ; " Well, then (says Pope), let's split the difference ; there's six hundred for you." Broome and Fenton intend a joint work (something serious), and to advertise at the end of it, or to specify in the preface, exactly what share they had in the 51 52 FENTON AND BROOME. translation. They had neither of them any hand in the ittle pamphlets, etc., of the last year or two ; but Mr. Blount used to send Broome all the little things as they came out. — Mr. Blount of Twickenham, and of Clare Hall, Cambridge. GARTH. [Sir Samuel Garth, physician and poet, was born in 1672, and died in 1718. He published in 1699 The Dispensary, a poem with a purpose, which, " as its subject was present and popular, co-operated with passions and prejudices then prevalent, and, with such auxiliaries to its intrinsic merit, was universally and liberally applauded" (Johnson). He also wrote the epilogue to Addison's Cato. Garth has been accused of irreligion, but the worst that can be said of him is that he did not make a formal profession of Christianity. It is to this circumstance that Pope alludes in "A Farewell to London" (1718) — " Farewell Arbuthnot's raillery On every learned sot ; And Garth, the best good Christian he, Although he knows it not."] When Dr. Garth had been for a good while in a bad state of health, he sent one day for a physician with whom he was par- ticularly intimate, and conjured him by their friendship, and by everything that was most sacred (if there was anything more sacred), to tell him sincerely whether he thought he should ever be able to get rid of his illness or not. His friend, thus conjured, told him "that he thought he might struggle on with it perhaps for some years, but that he much feared he could never get the better of it entirely." Dr. Garth thanked him for dealing so fairly with him, turned the discourse to other 53 54 GARTH. things, and talked very cheerfully all the rest of the time he stayed with them. As soon as he was gone he called for his servant, said he was a good deal out of order, and would go to bed : he then sent him for a surgeon to bleed him. Soon after he sent for a second surgeon, by a different servant, and was bled in the other arm. He then said he wanted rest, and when everybody had quitted the room he took off the bandages, and lay down with a design of bleeding to death. His loss of blood made him faint away, and that stopped the bleeding. He afterwards sunk into a sound sleep, slept all the night, waked in the morning without his usual pains, and said, " If it would continue so, he could be content to live on." In his last illness he did not use any remedies, but let his distemper take its course. He was the most agreeable companion I ever knew. — Mr. Townley, of Townley, in Lancashire {who had this account from Garth himself). Garth talked in a less libertine manner than he had been used to do about the last three years of his life. He was rather doubtful and fearful than religious. It was usual for him to say, " that if there was any such thing as religion 'twas among the Roman Catholics." Probably from the greater efficacy we give the Sacraments. He died a Papist, as I was assured by Mr. Blount, who carried the Father to him in his last hours. He did not take any care of himself in his last illness, and had talked for three or four years as one tired of life ; in short, I believe he was willing to let it go. — Pope. Garth sent to Addison (of whom he had a very high opinion) on his death-bed, to ask him whether the Christian religion was true. — Dr. Young, from Addison himself or Tickeli, which is much the same. GAY. [John Gay was born at Barnstaple in 1685, and was educated at the grammar-school of that town. He was apprenticed to a mercer in London, but he left the shop for literature. Wine, a blank verse poem from his pen, appeared in 1708. A few years afterwards Gay became acquainted with Pope, to whom he inscribed his Rural Sports in 1713. The Fan appeared in 1714, and was succeeded by a burlesque of Ambrose Philips' Pastorals, under the title of The Shep- herd's Week. The What-d'ye-Call it (a *' tragi-comi- pastoral farce") was acted in 1715, and Trivia, or, the Art of Walking the Streets of Loftdon, appeared early in the next year. Three Hours after Marriage, a comedy written in conjunction with Pope and Arbuthnot, was acted at Drury Lane in January 17 17. An edition of his works in 1720 secured the fortunate poet a thousand pounds, which he promptly lost by investing it in South Sea stock. Early in 1724, The Captives, a tragedy, was successfully produced at Drury Lane. It is upon the poems and plays of the last half-dozen years of his life that Gay's literary reputation now chiefly rests. The first series of his Fables appeared in 1727 ; but, though avowedly written to improve the young Duke of Cumberland, they failed to bring the author that political preferment for which he hungered all his life. A second series was published after his death. The Beggar's Opera, produced in 1728, achieved an unpre- cedented success. The sequel, Polly, was forbidden to be acted. Gay died in 1732, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.] 55 56 GAY. Mr. Pope brought some of the WJiai-d'ye-Call it in his own handwriting to Gibber, the part about the miscarriage in particular, but not much beside. When it was read to the players, Mr. Pope read it, though Gay was by. Gay always used to read his own plays. After this, upon seeing a knife with the name of J. Gay upon it, Gibber said : " What 1 does Mr. Pope make knives too ?" — Cibber, Mr. Addison and his friends had exclaimed so much against Gay's Tlij-ee Horns after Marriage for obscenities, that it provoked him to write "A Letter from a Lady in the City to a Lady in the Country," on that subject In it he quoted the passages which had been most exclaimed against, and opposed other passages to them from Addison's and Steele's plays. These were aggravated in the same manner that they had served his, and appeared worse. Had it been published it would have made Addison appear ridiculous, which he could bear as little as any man, I therefore prevailed upon Gay not to print it, and have the manuscript now by me. — Pope. Dr. Swift had been observing once to Mr. Gay what an odd pretty sort of thing a Newgate Pastoral might make. Gay was inclined to try at such a thing for some time, but afterwards thought it would be better to write a comedy on the same plan. This was what gave rise to the Beggaj's Opera. He began on it, and when first he mentioned it to Swift, the Doctor did not much like the project. As he carried it on, he showed what he wrote to both of us ; and we now and then gave a correction, or a word or two of advice ; but it was wholly of his own writing. When it was done, neither of us thought it would succeed. We showed it to Congreve, who, after reading it GAY. 57 over, said, " It would either take greatly, or be damned con- foundedly." We were all at the first night of it, in great uncertainty of the event ; till we were very much encouraged by overhearing the Duke of Argyle, who sat in the next box to us, say, " It will do — it must do 1 — I see it in the eyes of them." This was a good while before the first act was over, and so gave us ease soon ; for the Duke (besides his own good taste) has a more particular knack than any one now living in dis- covering the taste of the public He was quite right in this, as usual ; the good nature of the audience appeared stronger and stronger every act, and ended in a clamour of applause. — F. I wrote the law case of the black and white horses, with the help of a lawyer : (by what he added, it was the late Master of the Rolls, Fortescue). Dr. Arbuthnot was the sole writer of Jo/in Bull J and so was Gay of the Beggar's Opera. I own appearances are against the latter ; for it was written in the same house with me and Dr. Swift. He used to communicate the parts of it, as he wrote them, to us ; but neither of us did any more than alter an expression here and there. — P. Gay was quite a natural man, wholly without art or design, and spoke just what he thought, and as he thought it. He dangled for twenty years about a court, and at last — was offered to be made Usher to the young Princesses, Secretary Craggs made Gay a present of stock in the South Sea year ; and he was once worth twenty thousand pounds, but lost it all again. He got about four hundred pounds by the first Bcggat's Opci-a, and eleven or twelve hundred by the second. He was negligent and a bad manager ; latterly the Duke of Queensbury took his money into his keeping, and let him have only what was necessary out of it ; and as he lived with them he could not S8 GAV. have occasion for much. He died v;orth upwards of three thousand pounds. — P. Gay was remarkable for an unwilhngness to offend the great by any of his writings ; he had an uncommon timidity upon him in relation to anything of that sort. And yet you see what ill luck he had that way, after all his care not to offend ! — P. Gay was a great eater, "As the French philosopher used to prove his existence by cogito ergo sum, the greatest proof of Gay's existence is cdi ergo at." — \Cong?eve in a letter to Pope.'\ KNELLER. [Sir Godfrey Kneller was born at Lubeck, in the Duchy of Holstein, in the year 1648.. He studied painting in the school of Rembrandt and in Italy ; and in 1674 came to EngLmd, at the request of the Duke of Monmouth, and painted Charles II. When Sir Peter Lely died in 1680, Kneller was left without a rival in the art of portrait-painting in this country. He was soon afterwards appointed Court painter, a post which he held into the days of George I. He was created a knight by William III., and a baronet by George I. His profession proved a profitable one, and Kneller was enabled to leave property worth ;!{^2ooo a year. He died in 1723. Two of the best portraits of Pope are from Kneller's brush.] As I was silting by Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, whilst he was drawing a picture, he stopped and said, "I can't do so well as I should do, unless you flatter me a little ; pray flatter me, Mr. Pope ! you know I love to be flattered." I was once willing to try how far his vanity would carry him,^ and, after considering a picture which he had just finished for a good while very attentively, I said to him in French (for he had been talking for some time before in that language) — " On lit dans les Ecritures Saintes, que le bon Dieu faisoit I'homme apr^s son image : mais, je crois, que s'il voudroit faire un autre k present, qu'il le feroit apr^s I'image que voilii." Sir Godfrey turned round and said 59 6o KNELLER. very gravely — " Vous avez raison, Mons. Pope ; par Dieu, je le crois aussi." — Pope. Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. " Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, " you have the honour of seeing the two greatest men in the world." " I don't know how great you may be," said the Guinea man, "but I don't like your looks : I have often bought a man much better than both of you together, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas." — Dr. Warburton. In the Chamber of Painters' Heads, drawn by themselves, out of two hundred and forty, there are but five from England, and not any one of these properly an Englishman. Kneller's is set up above all the rest, and is full of his usual vanity. He has inserted his gold chain, diamond ring, and his house at Twickenham in the background. It is not much liked, and I believe it will soon be removed quite out of the room. We have no head of Corregio, out of his modesty ; nor of Carlo Maratti, for a reason just contrary. — Sig. Bianchi. The German painters are not so genteel \si valenthuomini\ nor so good as the French. I have seen but very little of Sir Godfrey Kneller's. There is a Mocenigo, done by him here at Venice ; that is a very good piece. In speaking of Sir Godfrey on another occasion, she said, " I concluded he could not be religious, because he was not modest." — Signora Rosalba, at Venice. " Did you never hear Sir Godfrey's dream ? " " No." " Why, then, I'll tell it you. A night or two ago," said Sir Godfrey, " I had a very odd sort of dream. I dreamt that I was dead, and soon after found myself walking in a narrow path that led up KNELLER. 6i between two hills, rising pretty equally on each side of it. Before me I saw a door, and a great number of people about it, I walked on toward them. As I drew nearer I could distinguish St. Peter by his keys, with some other of the Apostles ; they were admitting the people as they came next the door. When I had joined the company, I could see several seats, every way, at a little distance within the door. As the first, after my coming up, approached for admittance, St. Peter asked his name, and then his religion. * I am a Roman Catholic,' replied the spirit. ' Go in, then,' says St. Peter, * and sit down on those seats there on the right hand.' The next was a Presbyterian ; he was admitted, too, after the usual questions, and ordered to sit down on the seats opposite to the other. My turn came next, and, as I approached, St. Peter very civilly asked me my name. I said it was Kneller. I had no sooner said so than St. Luke (who was standing just by) turned toward me and said, with a great deal of sweetness — ' What ! the famous Sir Godfrey Kneller, from England ?' ' The very same, sir,' says I, 'at your service.' On this St. Luke immediately drew near to me, embraced me, and made me a great many compliments on the art we had both of us followed in this world. He entered so far into the subject that he seemed almost to have forgot the business for which I came thither. At last, however, he recollected himself, and said — ' I beg your pardon, Sir Godfrey ; I was so taken up with the pleasure of conversing with you I But, apropos, pray, sir, what religion may you be of?' 'Why, truly, sir,' says I, ' I am of no religion.' * Oh 1 sir,' says he, ' you will be so good, then, as to go in and take your seat where you please.' " — P. I paid Sir Godfrey Kneller a visit but two days before he died.2 I think I never saw a scene of so much vanity in my life. 62 KNELLER. He was lying in his bed, and contemplating the plan he had made for his own monument. He said many gross things in relation to himself and the memory he should leave behind him. He said he should not like to lie among the rascals at Westminster; a memorial there would be sufficient; and desired me to write an epitaph for it* I did so afterwards, and I think it is the worst thing I ever wrote in my life. — P, LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE. [Lady Mary Wortley Montague was the daughter (as Lady Mary Pierrepoint) of the Earl, afterwards Duke of Kingston, and was born at Thoresby, Nottingham, in or about the year 1690. In 1712 she married Edward Wortley Montague, a diplomatist, whom she accompanied to Constantinople on his appointment to that Embassy in 1 7 16. While abroad she wrote the famous Turkish Letters (published in 1763), upon which her literary fame now chiefly rests. She returned to England in 17 18, and fixed her summer residence at Savile House, Twickenham, near the villa then recently purchased by Pope. In the year 1739 declining health compelled Lady Mary to quit England for Italy and the South of France, and she remained on the Continent until 1761. In that year she returned to England, and died in George Street, Hanover Square, in 1762. Pope and Lady Mary were at one time great friends, if not lovers ; but afterwards they quarrelled, and carried on an interesting but unedifying paper warfare. Pope has satirised her under the name of " Sappho."] When I was young I was a great admirer of Ovid's Meta- morphoses, and that was one of the chief reasons that set me upon the thoughts of stealing the Latin language. Mr. Wortley was the only person to whom I communicated my design, and he encouraged me in it. I used to study five or six hours a day, for two years, in my father's library ; 63 64 LADY MAR Y WOR TLB Y MO NT A G UE. and so got that language whilst everybody else thought I was reading nothing but novels and romances. — Lady Mary Worthy Montague at Rome} I admired Mr. Pope's Essay on Criticism at first very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics, and did not know that it was ^11 stolen. — Lady M, It was my fate to be much with the wits ; my father was acquainted with them all. Addison was the best company in the world. I never knew anybody that had so much wit as Congreve. Sir Richard Steele was a very good-natured man, and Dr. Garth a very worthy one. — Lady M. Gay was a good-natured man and a little poet. Swift has stolen all his humour from Cervantes and Rabelais. — Lady M. I would never be acquainted with Lord Bolingbroke, because I always looked upon him as a vile man. — Lady M. I don't remember that there was any such thing as two parties, one to set up Pope and the other Addison as the chief poet of those times. 'Twas a thing that could not bear any dispute. — Lady M. You are very wrong in thinking that Mr. Pope could write blank verse well ; he has got a knack, indeed, of writing the other, but was he to attempt blank verse I daresay he would appear quite contemptible in \\..—Lady M. I have got fifty or sixty of Mr. Pope's letters by me.^ "You shall see what a goddess he made of me in some of LAD Y MAR Y WORTLE Y MONTA G UE. 65 them, though he makes such a devil of me in his writings afterwards, without any reason that I know of." — Lady M. [Several of these letters were on common subjects, and one in particular, that odd description of an Old Mansion, which he also sent to the Duke of Buckingham in answer to one of the Duke's, containing a description of Buckinj^ham House. This may show that it was one of his favourite letters. — Spence.'] I got a common friend to ask Mr. Pope why he had left off visiting me?^ He answered negligently that he went as often as he used to do. I then got Dr. Arbuthnot to ask him what Lady M. had done to him ? He said that Lady M. and Lord Hervey had pressed him once together (and I don't remember that we were ever together with him in our lives) to write a satire on some certain persons, that he refused it, and that this had occasioned the breach between us. — Lady M. " Don't you really think so, sir ? " "I think, Madam, that he writes verses very well." " Yes, he writes verses so well that he is in danger of bringing even good verse into disrepute ! from his all tune and no meaning." — Lady M. " Leave him as soon as you can (said Addison to me, speaking of Pope); he will certainly play you some devilish trick else : he has an appetite to satire 1 " — Lady M. Montesquieu, in his Persian Letters,* has described the manners and customs of the Turkish ladies as well as if he had been bred up among them. — Lady M. 71S 66 LAD V MAR V IVOR 2LE Y MONT A G UE. The ladies at Constantinople used to be extremely surprised to see me go always with my bosom uncovered. It was in vain that I said everybody did so among us, and added everything I could in defence of it. They could never be reconciled to what they thought so immodest a custom ; and one of them, after I had been defending it to my utmost, said, "Oh, my sultana, you can never defend the manners of your country, even with all your wit ! but I see you are in pain for them, and shall therefore press it no further." — Lady M. One of the highest entertainments in Turkey is having you to their baths. When I was introduced to one, the lady of the house came to undress me ; another high compliment they pay to strangers. After she had slipped off my gown and saw my stays, she was very much struck at the sight of them, and cried out to the other ladies in the bath : " Come hither, and see how cruelly the poor English ladies are used by their husbands. You need boast indeed of the superior liberties allowed you, when they lock you thus up in a box!" — Lady M. It was from the customs of the Turks that I first thought of a septennial bill for the benefit of married persons, and of the advantages that might arise from our wives having no portions. — Lady M. [That lady's little treatise upon these two subjects is very prettily written, and has very uncommon arguments in it. She is very strenuous for both those tenets. That every married person should have the liberty of declar- ing, every seventh year, whether they choose to continue to live together in that state for another seven years or not ; and she also argues, that if women had nothing but their LADY MARY WO R TLB Y MONTAGUE. 67 own good qualities and merit to recommend them, it would make them more virtuous, and their husbands more happy, than in the present marketing-way among us. She seems very earnest and serious on the subject, and wishes the legislature would take it under their consideration, and regulate those two points by her system. — Spence.'] Sure there cannot be a more detestable set of beings upon the earth than those anti-knight-errants, who run about only to ruin as many ladies as they can. — Lady M. Lord Bacon makes beauty to consist in grace and motion. — Lady M. [Mr. Locke makes it consist in colour and figure. Perhaps the two definitions joined would make one much better than either of them is apart. — Spence^ Lydia, in Lady Mary Wortley Montague's poems, is almost wholly Gay's, and is published as such in his works. There are only five or six lines new set in it by that lady. It was that which gave the hint ; and she wrote the other five eclogues. — Pope. NEWTON. [Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest natural philosopher which this country has ever produced, was born in 1642. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661 ; became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at that University in 1669 ; was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672 ; was made Warden of Mint in 1696, and Master in 1699 ; was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703 ; and was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. Newton's greatest discoveries in science are the theory of gravitation and the compound nature of light. The fall of an apple gave Newton his first ideas on the subject of gravitation in 1665 ; and in the immortal Principia {Phtiosophtce Natur- alis Principia Mathematical 1687) he demonstrated for all time the great truth that the worlds of the solar system, and of all other systems which make up the universe, are kept in their paths by the same power of attraction which causes an apple to fall to the ground. By the use of a glass prism Newton produced the first solar spectrum, and showed that light is not homogeneous, but consists of rays of different refrangibility. This discovery, together with the results of other optical researches, was published in a treatise on Opticks in 1704. Newton also wrote on theological subjects and on chronology. He died in 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.] The French philosophers at present \circa 1730] chiefly follow Malebranche. They admire Sir Isaac Newton very 68 NEWTON. 69 much, but don't yet allow of his great principle ; it is his particular reasonings, experiments, and penetration for which they so much admire him. — The Chevalier Ramsay^ author of the " Travejs of Cyrus.'^ Sir Isaac Newton does not look on attraction as a cause, but as an efifect ; and probably as an effect of the ethereal fluid. The ancients had a notion much of the same kind, which I have some thoughts of proving in a memorial to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, in order to incline those gentle- men to come into that truth of Sir Isaac's ; and not only to allow him (which they already do) to be the greatest geo- metrician that ever was. — R. It is not at all improbable that Sir Isaac Newton, though so great a man, might have had a hankering after the French prophets. There was a time when he was possessed with the old fooleries of astrology ; and another when he was so far gone in those of chemistry as to be upon the hunt after the philosopher's stone. — Dr. Lockier, Dean of Peterborough. The pursuit of the greatest trifles may sometimes have a very good effect ; the search after the philosopher's stone has preserved chemistry ; and the following astrology so much in former ages has been the cause of astronomy's being so much advanced in ours. Sir Isaac Newton him- self has owned that he began with studying judicial astrology, and that it was his pursuit of that idle and vain study which led him into the beauties of, and love for, astronomy. — Dr. Cocchi^ at Florence. 70 NE WTON. When I asked Sir Isaac Newton how the study of the mathematics flourished in England? he said, "Not so much as it has done here, but more than it does in any other country." — Dr. C. Sir Isaac Newton, though so deep in Algebra and Fluxions, could not readily make up a common account : and, when he was Master of the Mint, used to get somebody to make up his accounts for him. — Pope. Sir Isaac Newton, a little before he died, said, " I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." — J^amsqy. Sir Isaac Newton's house at Coldsworth^ is a handsome structure. His study boarded round, and all jutting out. We were in the room where he was born. Both of as melancholy and dismal an air as ever I saw. Mr. Percival, his tenant, who still lives there, says he was a man of very few words ; that he would sometimes be silent and thoughtful for above a quarter of an hour together, and look all the while almost as if he was saying his prayers ; but that when he did speak, it was always very much to the purpose. — May 14, 1755. — Spence. The pretty close, with the winding stream and spring, which we passed, is called Bucely. The river Witham has its source (at a town of the same name) about two miles S.W. of Colds- worth ; it is fed by a number of springs from Sir Isaac's hill, and meanders on (by Mr Cholmondeley's and the Poltons) NEWTON. 71 to Grantham ; and goes by Lincoln and Boston into the sea. You pass close by one of these springs as you go to the house where Sir Isaac was born ; with two or three ash trees and hawthorns about the head of it. [I would place rock-work and seats there, with the following inscription : " S. SUMMO IN TeRRIS INTELLIGENT!^ FONTI QUI PaULO SUPRA HAS SCATURIGINES EXORTUS EST SUB FORMA HOMINIS NOMINE ISAACUS Newton."] There are some of the family buried in the churchyard. "In memory of John Newton, sen., 1725, aet. 53; and John Newton, jun., 1737, eet. 30." The latter of these perhaps the cousin to whom he left his estate there, and who run so entirely out of it that he would have come to the parish had he not died in so good time as he did. Dial on the little arbour by the churchyard : " Sic transit gloria mundi." Applied everything there to Sir Isaac. — Spence. Sir Isaac Newton, though he scarce ever spoke ill of any man, could hardly avoid showing his contempt for your virtuoso collectors and antiquarians. Speaking of Lord Pembroke once, he said, "Let him have but a stone doll and he is satis- fied. I can't imagine the utility of such studies ; all their pursuits are below nature." — Fr. Chute. When Sir Isaac Newton was asked about the continuance of the rising of South Sea Stock, he answered, " That he could not calculate the madness of the people." — Lord Radnor. A friend once said to him, " Sir Isaac, what is your opinion of poetry?" His answer was, " I'll tell you that of Barrow; — he said that poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense." — LordR. ■ I 1 OTWAY. [Thomas Otway was bom in 165 1, and is now chiefly remem- bered as the author of two fine tragedies, The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682). He died in 1685.] Otway had an intimate friend (one Blackstone) who was shot; the murderer fled towards Dover; and Otway pursued him. In his return he drank water when violently heated,' and so got a fever, which was the death of him. — Dcmtis. Otway has written but two tragedies, out of six, that are pathetic. I believe he did it without much design; as Lillo has done in his Barnwell. 'Tis a talent of nature rather than an effect of judgment, to write so movingly. — PoJ>e. 72 PETERBOROUGH. [Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, was born in 1658. He commanded the English and Dutch armies in Spain during the war of the Spanish Succession, and took Barcelona in 1705. He was subsequently made imperial commander-in-chief, and died at Lisbon in 1735.] " Sacrez-vous vos Rois?" "Si nous les sacrons, Monsieur ! parbleu, nous les massacrons," was the answer of Lord Peterborough to the Prince of Celamar. — Ramsay. 'Tis amazing how Lord Peterborough keeps up his spirits under so violent and painful an illness as he is afflicted with. When I went down into Hampshire to see him, a few weeks ago \circa 1734], I did not get to him till the dusk of the evening ; he was sitting on his couch, and entertaining all the company with as much life and sprightliness of conversation as if he had been perfectly well ; and, when the candles were brought in, I was amazed to see that he looked more like a ghost than a living creature. Dying as he was, he went from thence to Bristol, and it was there that it was declared that he had no chance for a recovery but by going through the tor- ture of a very uncommon chirurgical operation ; and that even with it, there were a great many more chances against him than for him. However, he would go through it, and the very day after set out from Bristol for Bath, in spite of all that St 73 74 PETERBOROUGH. Andre and the physician could say to \^\\Xi.—Pope. [It was some time after this that I saw him at Kensington. I was admitted into his ruclle (for he kept his bed), and every- body thought he could not last above five or six days longer; and yet his first speech to me was, " Sir, you have travelled, and know the places ; I am resolved to go abroad ; which of the two would you think best for me to go to, Lisbon or Naples?" That very day he would rise to sit at dinner with us ; and in a little time after actually went to Lisbon.— 5^^?z«.] "A general is only a hangman-in-chief." — Lord Peterboroifgh. [They had been just speaking of General Cadogan and his father.] " One morning when I went to hear Penn preach, for 'tis my way to be civil to all religions." — Lord P. " I would willingly live to give that rascal (Burnet) the lie in half his history." ^ — Lord P. [He had marked both the volumes in several parts of the margin, and carried them with him to Lisbon. — PopeJ] "I took a trip once with Penn to his colony of Pennsylvania. The laws there are contained in a small volume ; and are so extremely good, that there has been no alteration wanted in any one of them, ever since Sir William made them. They have no lawyers. Every one is to tell his own case, or some friend for him ; they have four persons, as judges, on the bench ; and after the case has been fully laid down, on both sides, all the four draw lots ; and he on whom the lot falls decides the question. 'Tis a fine country, and the people are neither oppressed by poor's-rates, tithes, nor taxes." — Lord P. PETERBOROUGH. 75 " I was extremely inclined to have gone to Lisbon with Lord Peterborough." "That might have done you good indeed, as to your health ; but it must have been a very melancholy thing for you to be so entirely (as you would have been) with a person in his condition." " That's true ; but if you consider how I should have been employed all the time, in nursing and attending a sick friend, that thought would have made it agreeable." — Pope. Lord Peterborough could dictate letters to nine amanuenses together; as I was assured by a gentleman who saw him do it when Ambassador at Turin. He walked round the room, and told each in his turn what he was to write. One perhaps was a letter to the emperor, another to an old friend, a third to a mistress, a fourth to a statesman, and so on : yet he carried so many and so different connections in his head, all at the same time. — P. Lord Peterborough was not near so great a genius as Lord Bolingbroke. — They were quite unlike. Lord Peterborough, for instance, in the case just mentioned, would say pretty and lively things in his letters ; but they would be rather too gay and wandering ; whereas, was Lord Bolingbroke to write to the emperor, or to the statesman, he would fix on that point which was the most material, and would set it in the strongest and finest light, and manage it so as to make it the most serviceable to his purpose. — P, k AMBROSE PHILIPS. [Ambrose Philips was born in 1695. His first published poems were six Pastorals^ which appeared in the sixth book of Tonson's Miscellany (1709) — the same volume in which Pope made his d3ttt, also with pastorals. A zealous Whig and a poet, Philips probably found it easy to make the acquaintance of Addison and Steele, and he subsequently became an important member of the "little senate" which met nightly at Button's. His tragedy, T/ie Distressed Mother (founded upon Racine's Androinaque)^ was successfully produced in 1712. Philips was made a Commissioner of the Lottery and a Justice of the Peace in 1 7 17; wrote two more tragedies and some poems; went with Archbishop Boulter to Ireland, where he filled some posts under Government ; and finally returned again to London in 1748. In the following year he died.] Ambrose Philips was a neat dresser, and very vain. In a conversation between him, Congreve, Swift, and others, the discourse ran a good while on Julius Caesar. After many things had been said to the purpose, Ambrose asked what sort of person they supposed Julius Ccesar was.'' He was answered that from medals, etc., it appeared that he was a small man and thin-faced. " Now, for my part," said Ambrose, " I should take him to have been of a lean make, pale complexion, extremely neat in his dress ; and five feet seven inches high" — an exact description of Philips himself. Swift, who understood 76 AMBROSE PHILIPS. 77 good breeding perfectly well, and would not interrupt anybody while speaking, let him go on, and, when he had quite done, said — "And I, Mr. Philips, should take him to have been a plump man, just five feet five inches high; not very neatly dressed, in a black gown, with pudding sleeves." — Dr. Yoimg. The Critique on the Pastorals in the Guardian was written by Mr. Pope himself,^ and commends Philips in such points as Mr. P. exceeds him in evidently, or else commends him falsely, as for making his flowers all blow at one season. Addison and that party then had a great desire ol running Pope down. — Lang. Lord Oxford was no great scholar, and very ignorant of Greek, yet he took great delight in repeating hard Greek verses, and in talking a man down. Philips, being apprised of his weakness, after a bottle or two, got the better of him, and my lord loved him the better for it ever after. — Lord Bolingbroke. PRIOR. [Matthew Prior was born in 1664, and was educated at Westminster and St. John's College, Cambridge. It was at the University, in conjunction with his friend, Charles Montague (afterwards Lord Halifax), that he wrote The Cotmtry Mouse and the City Mouse (1687), a spirited burlesque of The Hind and the Panther, which Dryden had published a short time previously. The remainder of Prior's life was divided between diplomacy and the writing of verses. Under William III. he acted as secretary to several embassies, and was for a short time Under- Secretary of State. In 1701 he entered Parliament as member for East Grinstead, and about the same time changed his politics, turning from a "strong Whig" to a " violent Tory." Towards the close of Queen Anne's reign Prior was again employed in important negotiations, but the death of the Queen, and the consequent downfall of the Tory ministry, brought his diplomatic career to an end. Prior's poems comprise : {a) four tales, ib) love verses, dialogues, songs, epigrams, and miscellaneous pieces, {c) occasional pieces — three odes to the king and three battle- pieces, (rf) Alma, and {e) Solomoft. A contemplated History of His Own Times was not finished, but such materials as he had collected appeared in the form of an ill-digested narrative of his various "negotiations" in 1740, Prior died in 1721.] " Did not he [Lord Halifax] write the Country Mouse with Mr. Pryor ? "— " Yes, just as if I was in a chaise with Mr. 78 PRIOR. 79 Cheselden here, drawn by his fine horse, and should say — Lord, how finely we draw this chaise !" — Lord Peierborottgk. Lord Bathiirst used to call Prior his verseman, and Lewis his proseman. Prior, indeed, was nothing out of verse, and was less fit for business than even Addison, though he piqued himself much upon his talents for it. What a simple thing was it to say upon his tombstone that he was writing a history of his own times !-^ He could not write in a style fit for history, and, I daresay, he never had set down a word toward any such thing. — Pope. Prior was not a right good man. He used to bury himself for whole days and nights together with a poor mean creature, and often drank hard. He turned from a strong Whig (which he had been when most with Lord Halifax) to a violent Tory, and did not care to converse with any Whigs after, any more than Rowe did with Tories. — P. Prior left most of his effects to the poor woman he kept company with — his Chloe ;- everybody knows what a wretch she was. I think she had been a little alehouse-keeper's wife. — P. [This celebrated lady is now married to a cobbler at . — Note by Mr. Spcfice."] Prior kept everything by him, even to all his school exercises. There is a manuscript collection of this kind in his servant Drift's hands, which contains at least half as much as all his published works. And there are nine or ten copies of verses among them which I thought much better than several things he himself published. In particular, I remember there was a dialogue of about two hundred verses between Apollo and 8o PRIOR. Daphne, which pleased me as much as anything of his I ever read. — P. There are also four dialogues in prose between persons of characters very strongly opposed to one another, which I thought very good. One of them was between Charles the Fifth and his tutor, Adrian the Sixth, to show the different turns of a person who had studied human nature only in his closet, and of one who had rambled all over Europe. Another, between Montaigne and Locke, on a most regular and a very loose way of thinking. A third, between Oliver Cromwell and his mad Porter; and the fourth, between Sir Thomas More and the Vicar of Bray. — P. There are but three poets who have any constant great run of popularity now — Pope, Prior, and Addison. — Mr. Harte, ROWE. [Nicholas Rowe was bom in 1673. He wrote several tragedies, among which are Ta/nerla?ie (1702) ; The Fair Pcniicnt, founded upon a play by Massinger (1703); The Royal Convert (1708) ; Jane Shore (17 14) ; and Lady Jane Grey (171 5). He died in 1718.] Rowe was bred first at Westminster, and then at the Temple. He had about three hundred pounds a year, and his chambers there. His father was a Serjeant-at-Law. He was of a comely personage, and a very pretty sort of man. — Mr. Lewis. The following epigram was made by Rowe upon Phil. Frovvd's uncle, when he was writing a tragedy of Cinna — " Frowd for his })recious soul cares not a jiin-a, For he can now do nothing else but Cin-na." "I thought Rowe had been too grave to write such things?" He ! — why he would laugh all day long ! he would do nothing else but laugh. — Pope. Lord Oxford was huddled in his thoughts, and obscure in his manner of delivering them. It was he who advised Rowe 81 716 82 ROWE. to learn Spanish; and after all his pains and expectations, only said: "Then, Sir, I envy you the pleasure of reading Don Quixote in the original." — " Was not that cruel ? " — " I don't believe it was meant so; it was more like his odd way." — Pt STEELE. [Sir Richard Steele was born in Dublin in 1672. He founded the Tatlcr (1710) ; wi^ote, in conjunction with Addison and others, the Spectator {ij 11-12); and conducted the Guardia?i, E7igHshinan, Lover, etc., etc. His other works include the Christian Hero (1701), and four come- dies, 77/1? Funeral (1701), the Lying Lover (1703), the Tender Husband {ijo^), and the Conscious Lovers {1^22). Steele was also an active politician. He was knighted by George I., and died in 1729.] Sir Richard Steele was the best-natured creature in the world. Even in his worst state of health he seemed to desire nothing but to please and be pleased. — Dr. V. Could Montaigne's Fssajs give a hint to our Tatter? He begins several of them with a quotation from the classics, and chats on at his ease. A couple of good Tatters takeable from chap. 19, lib. i., " On Death." — Spence. I have heard Sir Richard Steele say, that though he had a greater share in the Tatters than in the Spectators, he thought the news article in the first of these was what contributed much to their success. He confessed that he was much hurt that Addison should direct his papers in the Spectator to be printed oflf again in his works. It looked as if he was too much con- cerned for his own fame to think of the injury he should do the 84 STEELE. pecuniary interests of an indigent friend, particularly as in the Spectator itself they were sufificiently ascertained to be his by the mark CLIO.^ He confirmed in some degree the character Pope gives of Addison : from what Sir Richard dropt in various conversations it seems to have been but too true. — Fr. Chute. SWIFT. [Jonathan Swift was bom in Dublin in 1667. While a young man he acted for some years as secretary to Sir William Temple, a kinsman, after whose death he became rector of Laracor, a village in Ireland. From the autumn of 1 7 10 to the death of Queen Anne in 17 14, Swift was a powerful supporter of the Tory administration under Harley and Bolingbroke. Meantime he had been rewarded by being appointed to the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin; and here he privately married Esther Johnson, to whom the Journal to Stella is addressed, in 1716. He died insane in 1745. Swift's principal works are The Battle of the Books and the Tale of a Tub (written while he was with Sir William Temple, but not published until 1704); Draficr''s Letters (1724), and Gulliver^s Travels (1726). Besides the books mentioned. Swift wrote a great number of political pieces and miscellaneous essays.] Dr. Swift has told me that he was born in the town of Leicester,^ and that his father was minister of a parish in Herefordshire. — Pope. Dr. Swift had an odd, blunt way, that is mistaken by strangers for ill-nature. 'Tis so odd that there is no de- scribing it but by facts. I'll tell you one that just comes into my head. One evening Gay and I went to see him : you know how intimately we were all acquainted. On our coming in, " Hey-day, gentlemen," says the doctor, " what's the 85 S6 SWIFT. meaning of this visit ? How come you to leave all the great lords, that you are so fond of, to come hither to see a poor dean ?" " Because we would rather see you than any of them." " Ay, any one that did not know you so well as I do might believe you. But, since you are come, I must get some supper for you, I suppose?" "No, doctor, we have supped already." " Supped already ! that's impossible : why, 'tis not eight o'clock yet." " Indeed we have." " That's very strange : but if you had not supped, I must have got something for you. Let me see, what should I have had ? A couple of lobsters? Ay, that would have done very well — two shillings ; tarts — a shilling. But you will drink a glass of wine with me, though you supped so much before your usual time, only to spare my pocket?" " No ; we had rather talk with you than drink with you." " But if you had supped with me, as in all reason you ought to have done, you must have drank with me. A bottle of wine — two shillings. Two and two is four, and one is five : just two- and-sixpence a piece. There, Pope, there's half-a-crown for you ; and there's another for you, sir : for I won't save anything by you, I am determined." This was all said and done with his usual seriousness on such occasions ; and in spite of everything we could say to the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money. — P. Among the imitations in Pope and Swift's Miscellanies, that of the " City Shower" was designed by Swift to imitate Virgil's Georgic style. "The Alley," in imitation of Spenser, was written by Mr. Pope, with a line or two of Mr. Gay's in it : and the imitation of Chaucer was wholly by Mr. Pope. — P. [Dr. Swift lies a-bed till eleven o'clock, and thinks of wit for the day. — LockierJ] SWIFT. 87 Dr. Swift was a great reader and admirer of Rabelais, and used sometimes to scold me for not liking him enough. Indeed there were so many things in his works, in which I could not see any manner of meaning driven at, that I could never read him over with any patience. — P. . That picture of Dr. Swift is very like him. Though his face has a look of dulness in it, he has very particular eyes : they are quite azure as the heavens, and there's a very uncommon archness in them. — P. When Swift and I were once in the country for some time together, I happened one day to be saying, "that if a man was to take notice of the reflections that came into his mind on a sudden as he was walking in the fields, or sauntering in his study, there might be several of them perhaps as good as his most deliberate thoughts." On this hint we both agreed to write down all the volunteer reflections that should thus come into our heads all the time we stayed there. We did so : and this was what afterwards furnished out the maxims published in our miscellanies. Those at the end of one volume are mine, and those in the other Dr. Swift's. — P. Rollin has written a letter very full of compliments to Dr. Swift. "Has not he aftronted him by it?" No; the doctor does not hate praise ; he only dislikes it when it is extravagant or coarse. When B told him he loved him more than all his friends and relations, the dean made him no manner of answer; but said afterwards, "The man's a fool!" I once said to him, " There's a lady, doctor, that longs to see you, and admires you above all things." "Then I despise her heartily |" said he. — P. 88 SWIFT. When I had filled up this Epistle, begun by Swift, I sent it to him, and thought I had hit his style exactly ; for it was familiar, lively, and with odd rhymes. The doctor had a very different opinion of it, and did not think it at all a right imitation of his style. — P. Dr. Swift gave Mr. Coote, a gentleman of very good character and fortune, a letter of recommendation to Mr. Pope, couched in the following terms : — " Dear Pope, — Though the little fellow that brings this be a justice of peace, and a member of our Irish House of Commons, yet he may not be altogether unworthy of your acquaintance." — Ah: Jo7ies, of Wchtiyn. " I'll send you my bill of fare," said Lord B., when trying to persuade Dr. Swift to dine with him. " Send me your bill of company," was Swift's answer to him. — D?: Young. THOMSON. [James Thomson was born at Ednam (Roxburghshire) in the year 1700, and at the age of twenty-five came from Edin- burgh to London in order that he might the better tempt fortune as a poet. He wrote JV/n/cr {ly 26), Summer {iiT.'j), Spring (1728), and Auitaim (1730) — four poems now col- lectively referred to as The Seasons. He also wrote and produced three tragedies — Sophonisba {1727)^ Agamemnon (1738), and Tancred and Sigismiinda (1745). He joined Mallet in writing Alfred the Great^ a masque played before Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1740. It is in this piece that the song "Rule Britannia" occurs. His last work was the Castle of Indolence^ published in 1746. Thomson died at Kew in 1748, and was buried at Richmond.] Thomson and Mallet were both educated at the University at Edinburgh. Thomson came up to town without any certain view. Mallet got him into a nobleman's family as tutor. He did not like that affair ; left it in about three-quarters of a year, and came down to Mallet at Twiford. There he wrote single winter pieces ; they at last thought it might make a poem. It was at first refused by the printer, but received by another. Mallet wrote the dedication to the Speaker. Dodington sent his services to Thomson by Dr. Young, and desired to see him; that was thought hint enough for another dedication to him; and this was his first introduction to that acquaintance. They 89 Qo THOMSON. make him promises, but lie has nothing substantial as yet. Thomson's father was a Presbyterian parson. — Mallet. Thomson's Winter is a huddled composition, and oftentimes not quite intelligible, yet he discovers the true spirit of poetry in him. — Mr. Harlc. WEST. [Gilbert West (1700- 17 56) was a friend of Lyttleton and Pitt. He wrote Observations on the Resurrection (1747), for which he was made Doctor of Laws by the University of Oxford ; and translated several of the Odes of Pindar. Another poem of West's is the Institution of the Garter, pubhshed in 1742.] Mr. West told me his piece on the Resurrection was written down only for his own satisfaction; he had no design of making a book of it, and thought it would have been only a sheet or two. Dr. Shaw wrote to Mr. Lyttleton, to let him know that the University were inclined to give him and Mr. West the Doctorate. Mr. Lyttleton, as his name was not to his piece, excused himself; ^ West had not the same excuse, so they sent him his diploma for it. Mr. West has trans- lated three or four Odes of Pindar, beside the twelve he is publishing. — Pindar is not so irregular, nor so abrupt as he has been generally imagined. Most of his hymns were sung in processions or triumphs ; and catch at the actions performed on parts of the ground they passed by, etc. His first Pythian, the best of them all : he is a very moral poet. Mr. West seems inclined to more serious studies ; and quoted Horace's '■'■ Nimirum sapere est abjectis utile NUGIS" with a stronger accent — Spence. 91 92 WEST. The works of Pindar that remain to us are by no means equal to his great character. His Dithyrambics, which were his best things, are lost ; and all that is left of his works being on the same subject, is the more apt to be tiresome. This is what induced me to desire Mr. West not to translate the whole, but only to choose out some of them. — Pope. WYCHERLEY. [William Wycherley, dramatist, was born in 1640. At the age of fifteen his father sent him into France to complete his education, and he returned to this country a fine gentleman and a papist. After the Restoration, Wycbeiley became a member of Queen's College, Oxford, where he was re-converted to Protestantism. Leaving Oxford with- out a degree, he came up to London, and was entered as a student at Middle Temple ; but " he soon left the dry study of the law, and gave in to pursuits more agreeable to his own genius as well as to the taste of the age." He wrote four comedies — Love in a IVood, or St. James's Park, acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 167 1 ; The Gentleman Dancing-Master, acted at the new theatre in Dorset Gardens in 1672 (a previous performance is doubtful) ; The Country Wife, acted by the King's Company at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1673 '■> '^'^^ "^^^^ Plai?i Dealer, acted at the same playhouse in 1674. The first of these plays was dedicated to the Duchess of Cleveland, whose good offices obtained for the author favour at Court ; the last is said to have led to an acquaintance with the Countess of Drogheda, whom the poet married. After the Countess's death, Wycherley became involved in a vexatious law-suit over the estate which she left him, and was eventually cast into the Fleet prison, where he lay several years. In 1704 he published a folio volume of Aliscellany Poems, and in the same year he made the acquaintance of Pope, who undertook to correct his verses. Wycherley married a second time in 93 94 WYCJJERLEY. 1715, and died "a Romanist" eleven days afterwards. His Posthumous Works, edited by Tlieobald, appeared in 1728.] Wycherley was fifteen or sixteen when he went into France ; and was acquainted there with Madame de Rambouillet, a little after Balzac's death. He was not unvain of his face. That is a fine portrait which was engraved by Smith for him in 1703. He was then about his grand climacteric; but sat for the picture from which it was taken when he was about twenty- eight. The motto to it, Quafiium vmtatus ab illo, was ordered by himself; and he used to repeat it sometimes with a melancholy emphasis. — Pope. Wycherley was a very handsome man. His acquaintance with the famous Duchess of Cleveland^ commenced oddly enough. One day, as he passed that duchess's coach in the ring, she leaned out of the window and cried out loud enough to be heard distinctly by him : " Sir, you're a rascal ; you're a villain ! " Wycherley from that instant entertained hopes. He did not fail waiting on her the next morning, and with a very melancholy tone begged to know how it was possible for him to have so much disobliged her Grace. They were very good friends from that time ; yet, after all, what did he get by her? He was to have travelled with the young Duke of Richmond ; King Charles gave him now and then a hundred pounds, not often.—/'. The chronology of Wycherley's plays I am well acquainted with, for he has told it me over and over. Love in a Wood he wrote when he was but nineteen ; The Gentleman Dancing- Master at twenty-one ; The Plain Dealer at twenty-five ; and The Country Wife at one or two and thirty.- — P. WYCHERLE Y. 95 Lord Rochester's character of Wycherley is quite wrong.* He was far from being slow in general, and in particular wrote The Plain Dealer in three weeks. — P. Wycherley was in a bookseller's shop at Bath, or Tunbridge, when Lady Drogheda came in and happened to inquire for the Plain Dealer. A friend of Wycherley's, who stood by him, pushed him toward her, and said, " There's the Plain Dealer, Madam, if you want him ! " Wycherley made his excuses ; and Lady Drogheda said " that she loved plain-dealing best." He afterwards visited that lady, and in some time after married her. This proved a great blow to his fortunes : just before the time of his courtship, he was designed for governor to the late Duke of Richmond ; and was to have been allowed fifteen hundred pounds a year from the government. His absence from Court in the progress of this amour, and his being yet more absent after his marriage (for Lady Drogheda was very jealous of him), disgusted his friends there so much that he lost all his interest with them. His lady died ; he got but little by her ; and his misfortunes were such that he was thrown into the Fleet, and lay there seven years. It was then that Colonel Brett got his Plai?t Dealer to be acted,* and contrived to get the king (James the Second) to be there. The colonel attended him thither. The king was mightily pleased with the play, I asked who was the author of it ; and upon hearing it was one of Wycherley's, complained that he had not seen him for so many years, and inquired what was become of him. The colonel improved this opportunity so well, that the king gave orders his debts should be discharged out of the privy purse. Wycherley was so weak as to give an account only of five hundred pounds, and so was confined almost half a year ; till 96 WYCHERLEY. bis lather was at last prevailed on to pay the rest, between two and three hundred pounds more. — Mr. Dennis., the Critic. Wycherley died a Romanist, and has owned that religion in my hearing. It was generally thought by this gentleman's friends that he lost his memory by old age ; it was not by age, but by accident, as he himself told me often. He remembered as well at sixty years old as he had done ever since forty, when a fever occasioned that loss to him. — Pope. Wycherley had this odd particularity in him, from the loss of his memory ; that the same chain of thought would return into his mind, at the distance of two or three years, without his remembering that it had been there before. Thus, perhaps he would write one year an Encomium on Avarice (for he loved Paradoxes) ; and a year or two after in Dispraise of Liberality; and in both the words only would differ, and the thoughts be as much alike as two medals of different metals out of the same mould. — P. Wycherley used to read himself asleep o' nights either in Montaigne, Rochefoucault, Seneca, or Gracian ; for these were his favourite authors. He would read one or other of them in the evening, and the next morning, perhaps, write a copy of verses on some subject similar to what he had been reading ; and have all the thoughts of his author, only expressed in a different mode, and that without knowing that he was obliged to any one for a single thought in the whole poem. I have ex- perienced this in him several times (for I visited him for a whole winter, almost every evening and morning), and look upon it as one of the strangest phenomena that I ever observed in the human mind. — P. WYCHERLEY. 97 Wycherley was really angry with me for correcting his verses so much. I was extremely plagued, up and down, for almost two years with them. However, it went off pretty well at last ; and it appears, by the edition of Wycherley's Posthumous Works, that he had followed the advice I so often gave him ; and that he had gone so far as to make some hundreds of prose maxims out of his verses. Those verses that are published are a mixture of Wycherley's own original lines, with a great many of mine inserted here and there (but not difficult to be dis- tinguished), and some of Wycherley's softened a little in the running, probably by Theobald, who had the chief care of that edition. — P. There were several verses of mine inserted in Mr. Wycherley's poems here and there, and particularly in those on " Solitude," on "A Life of Business," and on "A Middle Life."— P. The portrait Mr. Pope has of Wycherley was drawn when he was very old : as Sir Godfrey Kneller said he would make a very fine head without a wig. It was drawn at first with his little straggling grey hair : he could not bear it when done, and Sir Godfrey was obliged to draw a wig to it. — Mr. Saville. " People have pitied you extremely, on reading your letters to Wycherley : surely 'twas a very difficult thing for you to keep well with him ! " The most difficult thing in the world. He lost his memory forty years before he died by a fever, and would repeat the same thought sometimes in the compass of ten lines, and did not dream of its being inserted but just before. When you pointed it out to him he would say, "Gads-so, so it is 1 I thank you very much : pray blot it out," 717 98 WYCHERLE V. He bad the same single thouglits (which were very good) come into his head again that he had used twenty years before. His memory did not carry above a sentence at a time. These single sentences were good, but the whole was without con- nection, and good for nothing but to be flung into maxims. "In spite of his good sense I could never read his plays with true pleasure, from the general stiffness of the style!" "Ay, that was occasioned by his always studying for antitheses," — F. We were pretty well together to the last : only his memory was so totally bad that he did not remember a kindness done to him, even from minute to minute. He was peevish too, latterly, so that sometimes we were out a little, and sometimes in. He never did any unjust thing to me in his whole life ; and I went to see him on his death-bed. — P. Wycherley's nephew, on whom his estate was entailed (but with power to settle a widow's jointure), would not consent to his selling any part of it, which he wanted much to do, to pay his debts, about a thousand pounds. He had therefore long resolved to marry, in order to make a settlement from the estate, to pay off" his debts with his wife's fortune, and "to plague his damned nephew," as he used to express it. This was just about the time he had intended for it, as he only wanted to answer those ends by marrying, and dreaded the ridicule of the world for marrying when he was so old. After all, the woman he did marry proved a cheat, was a cast mistress of the person who recommended her to him, and was supplied by him with money for her wedding clothes. After Wycherley's death there were law quarrels about the settlement. Theobald was the attorney employed by her old friend ; and it was by this means that Theobald came to have Wycherley's papers in his hands. — P. YOUNG. [Dr. Edward Young was born in 1681, and was educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford. He wrote little poetry until he was thirty years old. Portions of The Last Day appeared in the Tailer in 1710; but the complete poem was not published until 17 13. Next year appeared a poem on Lady Jane Grey, entitled TJie Force of RcHgtott, or Vanquished Love. Bt/siris, a tragedy, was acted at Drury Lane in 17 19 ; the Revenge was produced two years later. Young's satires, collected in one volume, were pub- lished under the title. Love ofFame^ the Universal Passion^ in 1728. The poet took orders in the same year, and was soon afterwards appointed chaplain to George IL, whose predecessor had in 1725 granted him a pension of ;^2oo a year. The poem by which Young is now chiefly remem- bered is The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (founded upon, or at least suggested by, personal bereavements), which was completed in 1746. In 1762 was published a poem called Resigtiation. Much of Young's poetry consists of "occasional poems" — verses inscribed to kings or their ministers, with a view to obtaining more material benefits in return. He also wrote several pieces in prose. He died in 1765.] At that time of life, when the Duke of Wharton's^ most vehement ambition was to shine in the House as an orator, he found he had almost forgotten his Latin, and that it was neces- sary, with his present views, to recover it. He therefore 99 loo YOUNG. desired Dr. Young to go to Winchenden with him, where they did nothing but read Tully and talk Latin for six weeks, at the end of which the Duke talked Latin like that of Tully. The doctor on some other occasions as well as this called him a truly prodigious genius. — Dr. Yoiaig. A little after Dr. Young had published his Universal Passion, the Duke of Wharton made him a present of two thousand pounds for it. When a friend of the Duke's, who was surprised at the largeness of the present, cried out on hearing it, " What ! two thousand pounds for a poem ? " the Duke smiled, and said " It was the best bargain he ever made in his life, for it was fairly worth four thousand." — Mr. Rawlinson. When the Doctor was deeply engaged in writing one of his tragedies,'^ that nobleman made him a very different kind of a present. He procured a human skull, fixed a candle in it, and gave it to the Doctor as the most proper lamp for him to write tragedy by. — R. Tonson and Lintot were both candidates for printing some work of Dr. Young's. He answered both their letters in the same morning, and in his hurry misdirected them. When Lintot opened that which came to him, he found it begin — "That Bernard Lintot is so great a scoundrel, that," etc. It must have been very amusing to have seen him in his rage ; he was a great sputtering fellow. — Dr. Young. Voltaire, like the French in general, showed the greatest complaisance outwardly, and had the greatest contempt for us inwardly. He consulted Dr. Young about his Essay in Eng- lish, and begged him to correct any gross faults he might find YOUNG. loi in it. The Doctor set very honestly to work, marked the passages most liable to censure, and when he went to explain himself about them, Voltaire could not avoid bursting out a laughing in his face. — Dr. Young. [It was on the occa- sion of Voltaire's criticism on the episode of " Death and Sin " that Dr. Young spoke that couplet to him — " Thou'rt so ingenious, profligate, and thin, That thou thyself art Milton's death and sin." Voltaire's objection to that fine episode was that death and sin were non-existents. — Spettce.l There was a club held at the King's Head in Pall Mall that arrogantly called itself " The World." Lord Stanhope then (now Lord Chesterfield), Lord Herbert, etc., etc., were mem- bers. Epigrams were proposed to be written on the glasses by each member after dinner. Once when Dr. Young was invited thither, the doctor would have declined writing, because he had no diamond. Lord Stanhope lent him his, and he wrote immediately — " Accept a miracle instead of wit ; See two dull lines with Stanhope's pencil writ." — Dr. Yoting. The title of my poem {Night Thoughts) not affected ; for I never compose but at night, except sometimes when I am on horseback. — Dr. Yoimg. On my saying that old Cato in Cicero's delightful treatise on LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALTFOT?r-77A SAI^TA BARBARA I02 YOUNG. "Old Age" mentioned planting as the greatest pleasure for it, Dr. Young observed that he thought he could mention a greater — the looking back on a life well spent. — Spence. In the Iliad yon are fully engaged in the part you are read- ing ; in the Odyssey you are always wishing for the event. The latter is masterly in raising that appetite which is parti- cular to romance : the other is full in each part. One always affords the pleasure of expectation : the other of fruition. — Dr. Yoioig. The splendid fault of Lord Bacon and Malebranche is being too beautiful and too entertaining in points that require reason- ing alone. There should be one character preserved in style as much as in painting. In a picture, though each figure is dressed differently, and in so different colours, that they shall be all used variously in the piece, yet there is such a general air that at a distance you perceive it to be one representation, the tints are so well managed. — Dr. V. Cicero has not full justice done him : he suffers with us by our comparing him with Demosthenes, who is more strong and less diffused, and so more agreeable to our present taste. Had Cicero lived in Demosthenes's time and country, he would have followed his manner, and vz'ce versd. Nearly the same may be said of Horace and Juvenal. I believe it is true that Dryden gives the preference so much to Juvenal, because he had been just translating him.— Z?r. K 'Tis provoking that Dryden should give the preference to Persius too, for the same reason. — Mr. Reynel. YOUNG. 103 I think there are a great many fine copies ol verses in the Alusce AnglicancE. — Dr. V. [He mentioned only Bathiirst and Hannes.] Swift, Steele, and Addison are all great masters of humour. Swift had a mixture of insolence in his conversation. —Dr. Y. PART II. MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES. PART II. MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES. The Jews offered my Lord Godolphin to pay five hundred thousand pounds (and they would have made it a million), if the Government would allow them to purchase the town of Brentford, with leave of settling there entirely, with full privileges of trade, etc. The agent from the Jews said that the affair was already concerted with the chiefs of their brethren abroad; that it would bring the richest of their merchants hither, and of course an addition of above twenty millions of money to circulate in the nation. Lord Molesworth was in the room with Lord Godolphin when this proposal was made, and as soon as the agent was gone, pressed him to close in with it. Lord Godolphin was not of his opinion. He foresaw that it would provoke two of the most powerful bodies in the nation, the clergy and the merchants; he gave other reasons too against it, and in fine it was dropped. — Deati Lockier. The Jews had better success with Oliver Cromwell, when they desired leave to have a synagogue in London. They offered him, when Protector, sixty thousand pounds for that privilege. Cromwell appointed them a day for his giving them an answer. He then sent to some of the most powerful among 107 io8 MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES. the clergy, and some of the chief merchants in the city, to be present at their meeting. It was in the long gallery at Whitehall. Sir Paul Rycaut, who was then a young man, pressed in among the crowd, and said he never heard a man speak so well in his life as Cromwell did on this occasion. When they were all met, he ordered the Jews to speak for themselves. After that he turned to the clergy, who inveighed much against the Jews, as a cruel and cursed people. Crom- well, in his answer to the clergy, called them " Men of God," and desired to be informed by them whether it was not their opinion that the Jews were one day to be called into the church ? He then desired to know whether it was not every Christian man's duty to forward that good end all he could? Then he flourished a good deal on the religion prevailing in this nation, the only place in the world where religion was taught in its full purity: was it not then our duty, in particular, to encourage them to settle here, where alone they could be taught the truth, and not to exclude them from the sight, and leave them among idolaters? This silenced the clergy. He then turned to the merchants, who spoke much of their falseness and meanness, and that they would get their trade from them. "Tis true," says Cromwell, "they are the meanest and most despised of all people.* He then fell into abusing the Jews most heartily, and after he had said every- thing that was contemptible and low of them : " Can you really be afraid," said he, "that this mean, despised people should be able to prevail in trade and credit over the mer- chants of England, the noblest and most esteemed merchants of the whole world 1 " Thus he went on, till he had silenced them too, and so was at liberty to grant what he desired to the Jews. — L. {Who had this from Sir P. Ricaut himself as he had the former from Lord Molesworih.) 1 MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES, 109 Cromwell was inclined to spare the king, till he found there was no trust to be put in him. 'Tis said, at least, there was a private correspondence carried on between them for some time, Cromwell was to restore the king to his full regal power, and was himself to be made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, with some other advantageous articles. The queen heard of this, and wrote to the king to desire him " not to yield too much to the traitor." The king in his answer said " she need not have any concern in her mind on that head : for whatever agreement they might enter into, he should not look upon himself as obliged to keep any promises made so much on compulsion, whenever he had power enough to break through them." Cromwell intercepted this answer, and from that moment acted always uniformly to take away the king's life. — Pope. The night after King Charles the First was beheaded, my Lord Southampton and a friend of his got leave to sit up by the body, in the banqueting-house at Whitehall. As they were sitting very melancholy there, about two o'clock in the morning, they heard the tread of somebody coming very slowly upstairs. By-and-by the door opened, and a man entered, very much muffled up in his cloak, and his face quite hid in it. He approached the body, considered it very attentively for some time, and then shook his head and sighed out the words, " Cruel necessity ! " He then departed in the same slow and concealed manner as he had come in. Lord Southampton used to say that he could not distinguish anything of his face; but that by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver Cromwell. — P. Bishop Ken went to Rome with Dr. Walton.^ Part of his no MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES. design was to inquire into the Romish religion, and if he found it sound, to profess it and continue at Rome. He returned about 1675, after six years' stay abroad. In King James's reign, upon his complimenting him on some passages in his writings for their nearness of opinions, he told the king what little reason he had to do so : that he had been once inclined to his religion, but that the New Testament and his journey to Rome had quite cured him. The Bishop's persuad- ing Zulestien, the morning they were going for the hunting in Westphalia, to marry the maid-of-honour he had debauched, was the cause of his disgrace with the Prince of Orange, — Mr. Cheyne. You have heard of the Kit-Kat Club.^ The master of the house where the club met was Christopher Katt ; Tonson was secretary. The day Lord Mohun and the Earl of Berkley were entered of it, Jacob said he saw they were just going to be ruined. When Lord Mohun broke down the gilded emblem on the top of his chair, Jacob complained to his friends, and said that a man who would do that would cut a man's throat. So that he had the good and the forms of the society much at heart. The paper was all in Lord Hallifax's handwriting of a subscription of four hundred guineas for the encouragement of good comedies, and was dated 1709. Soon after that they broke up. Steele, Addison, Congreve, Garth, Vanbrugh, Maynwaring, Stepney, Walpole, and Pultney were of it ; so was Lord Dorset and the present Duke. Maynwaring, whom we hear nothing of now, was the ruling man in all con- versations ; indeed, what he wrote had very little merit in it. Lord Stanhope and the Earl of Essex were also members. I MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES. in Jacob has his own and all their pictures, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Each member gave him his, and he is going to build a room for them at Barn Elms. — Mr. Pope, 1730. Lord Oxford was not a very capable minister,^ and had a good deal of negligence into the bargain. He used to send trifling verses from Court to the Scriblerus Club almost every day, and would come and talk idly with them almost every night, even when his all was at slake. He talked of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was about, and everything he went to tell you was in the epic way, for he always began in the middle. They were quite mistaken in his temper who thought of getting rid of him by advising him to make his escape from the Tower. He would have sate out the storm, let the danger be what it would. He was a steady man, and had a great firmness of soul, and would have died unconcernedly, or perhaps, like Sir Thomas More, with a jest in his mouth.— P. Lord Oxford was not latterly in the Pretender's interest. He may have put on the appearance of being so to some great men ; but he betrayed them, by making his peace with the present family without their knowledge. — P. Inconsistent as the Duke of Marlborough's* character may appear to you, yet may it be accounted for if you gauge his actions by his reigning passion, which was the love of money. He endeavoured, at the same time, to be well both at Hanover and at St. Germains. This surprised you a good deal when 1 1 2 MISCELLANEO US ANECDOTES. I first told you of it ; but the plain meaning of it was only this, that he wanted to secure the vast riches he had amassed together, whichever should succeed. He was calm in the heat of battle ; and when he was so near being taken prisoner (in his first campaign) in Flanders, he was quite unmoved. It is true he was like to lose his life in the one and his liberty in the other ; but there was none of his money at stake in either. This mean passion of that great man operated very strongly in him in the very beginning of his life, and con- tinued to the very end of it. One day as he was looking over some papers in his scrutoire with Lord Cadogan, he opened one of the little drawers, took out a green purse, and turned some broad pieces out of it. After viewing them for some time with a satisfaction that appeared very visibly on his face : " Cadogan (said he), observe these pieces well ! they deserve to be observed ; there are just forty of them : 'tis the very first sum I ever got in my life, and I have kept it always unbroken from that time to this day." This shows how early and how strongly this passion must have been upon him ; as another little affair which happened in his last decline, at Bath, may serve (among many others) to show how miserably it continued to the end. He was playing there with Dean Jones at piquet, for sixpence a game ; they played a good while, and the Duke left off when winner of one game. Some time after, he desired the Dean to pay him his sixpence; the Dean said he had no silver ; the Duke asked him for it over and over, and at last desired that he would change a guinea to pay it him, because he should want it to pay the chair that carried him home. The Dean, after so much pressing, did at last get change, paid the Duke his sixpence ; observed him a little after leave the room, and declares that (after all the bustle that had been made for his sixpence) the MTSCELLANEO US ANECDOTES. 1 1 3 Duke actually walked home to save the little expense a chair would have put him to. — P. Lord Cadogan appeared shamefully at the Duke of Marl- borough's funeral. He showed his pleasure in his face and in his actions. All his behaviour on that occasion looked more like an exultation that he himself was going to be chief, than an attendance of that man to his grave who had been the entire making of him. — P. The Duke of Marlborough was long in correspondence with the Pretender. He sent him several sums, and particularly five thousand pounds at the time of his expedition against Scotland, by Robin Arbuthnot, then a banker at Boulogne. Lord Sunderland had strong dealings too, and even Lord Godolphin. — P. Several great Whigs were for bringing in the Pretender about the year 1714. The Duke of Marlborough was to advance thirty thousand pounds for that expedition ; and my uncle, Robin Arbuthnot, actually returned ten thousand pounds of it for him. — Miss Arbuthnot. Sir John Suckling was an immoral man,^ as well as debauched. The story of the French cards [his getting certain marks, known only to himself, affixed to all the cards that came from the great makers in France. — Spence\ was told me by the late Duke of Buckingham, and he had it from old Lady Dorset herself. — Pope. 718 114 MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES. That lady took a very odd pride in boasting of her familiarities with Sir John Suckling. She is the Mistress and Goddess in his poems; and several of those pieces were given by herself to the printer. This the Duke of Buckingham used to give as one instance of the fondness she had to let the world know how well they were acquainted. — P. Sir John Suckling was a man of great vivacity and spirit. He died about the beginning of the Civil War; and his death was occasioned by a very uncommon accident. He entered warmly into the king's interests, and was sent over to the Continent by him with some letters of great consequence to the queen. He arrived late at Calais, and in the night his servant ran away with his portmanteau, in which was his money and papers. When he was told of this in the morning he immediately inquired which way his servant had taken, ordered his horses to be got ready instantly, and in pulling on his boots found one of them extremely uneasy to him; but, as the horses were at the door, he leaped into his saddle and forgot his pain. He pursued his servant so eagerly that he overtook him two or three posts off, recovered his portmanteau, and soon after complained of a vast pain in one of his feet, and fainted away with it. When they came to pull off his boots to fling him into bed they found one of them full of blood. It seems his servant (who knew his master's temper well, and was sure he would pursue him as soon as his villainy should be discovered) had driven a nail up into one of his boots in hopes of disabling him from pursuing him. Sir John's impetuosity made him regard the pain only just at first, and his pursuit turned him from the thoughts of it for some time after. However, the wound was so bad, and so much inflamed, that it flung him into a violent fever, which ended his life in a very few days. MISCELLA NE O US ANECDO TES. 1 1 5 This incident, strange as it may seem, might be proved from some original letters in Lord Oxford's collection. — P. Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia^ took exceedingly at first, as an occasional play. It discovered the cant terms that were before not generally known, except to the cheats themselves ; and was a good deal instrumental in causing that nest of villains to be regulated by public authority. The story it was built on was a true fact. — Mr. Dennis, the Critic. The side oratories at St. Paul's were added to Sir Christopher Wren's^ original design, by order of the Duke of York, who was willing to have them ready for the Popish service, when there should be occasion. It narrowed the building, and broke in very much upon the beauty of the design. Sir Christopher insisted so strongly on the prejudice they would be of that he actually shed some tears in speaking of it ; but it was all in vain. The duke absolutely insisted upon their being inserted, and he was obliged to comply. — Mr. Harding. PART III. BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES RELATING TO POPE. PART III. BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. Mr. Pope was born on the 21st day of May 1688. Hiis first education was extremely loose and disconcerted. He began to learn Latin and Greek together (as is customary in the schools of the Jesuits, and which he seemed to think a good way) under Banister, their family priest, whom, he said, was living about two years ago at Sir Harry Tichburne's. He then learned his accidence at Twiford, where he wrote a satire on some faults of his master. He was then, a little while, at Mr. Dean's seminary at Marylebone, and some time under the same, after he removed to Hyde Park Corner. After this he taught him- self both Greek and Latin. "I did not follow the grammar; but rather hunted in the authors for a syntax of my own : and then began translating any parts that pleased me particularly in the best Greek and Latin poets: and by that means formed my taste ; which, I think, verily, about sixteen, was very near as good as it is now." — Pope. Mr. Pope was born in the city of London, in Lombard Street, at the house which is now one Mr. Morgan's, an apothecary. — Pope and Hooke. Mr. Pope's first education was under a priest, and I think his 119 I20 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. name was Banister. He set out with the design of teaching him Latin and Greek together. " I was then about eight years old, had learned to read of an old aunt, and to write by copying printed books. After having been under that priest about a year, I was sent to the seminary at Twiford, and then to a school by Hyde Park Corner : and with the two latter masters lost what I had gained under the first. About twelve years old, I went with my father into the Forest, and there learnt for a few months, under a fourth priest. This was all the teaching I ever had, and, God knows, it extended a very little way. When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry: and in a few years I had dipped into a great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. This I did without any design but that of pleasing myself: and got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several poets I read, rather than read the books to get the languages. I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the fields and woods, just as they fall in his way. These five or six years I still look upon as the happiest part of my life." — P. " In these rambles of mine through the poets, when I met with a passage or story that pleased me more than ordinary, I used to endeavour to imitate it, or translate it into Enghsh; and this gave rise to my Imitations published so long after." — P. [He named among other books he then read the criticisms of Rapin and Bossu; and these might be what led him to write his " Essay on Criticism." He used to mention Quintilian too as an old favourite author with him. — Spence.'] " It was our family priest Banister who taught me the BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 121 figures, accidence, and first part of grammar. If it had not been for that I should never have got any language : for I never learnt anything at the little schools I was at afterwards ; and never should have followed anything that I could not follow with pleasure. I learnt very early to read, and delighted extremely in it ; and taught myself to write very early too, by copying from printed books ; with which I used to divert myself as other children do with scrawling out pictures." — Pope. [When Mr. Pope got into the way of teaching himself, and applied so close to it in the Forest, some of his first exercises were imitations of the stories that pleased him most in Ovid, or any other poet that he was reading. I have one of these original exercises now by me, in his own hand. It is the story of Acis and Galatea, from Ovid ; and was translated when he was but fourteen years old. The title-page to this (from his manner of learning to write) is so like print, that it requires a good eye and nice regard to distinguish it. — Spence^ Mr. Pope was but a little while under his master at Twiford. He wrote extremely young ; and among other things a satire on that gentleman for some faults he had discovered in him. — Marmick. My brother was whipped and ill-used at Twiford school for his satire on his master, and taken from thence on that account. I never saw him laugh very heartily in all my life. — Mrs. Rackety speaking of Mt: Pope. [This is odd enough ! because she was with him so much in all the first part of his life, when he is said by persons most intimate with him to have been excessively gay and lively. It is very true, that in the latter part of his life, when he told a story, he was always 122 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. the last to laugh at it, and seldom went beyond a particular easy smile, on any occasion that I remember. — Spencc.'\ Mr. Pope was taught his accidence and the Greek alphabet by a priest in the family; was sent to school at Twiford when he was about eight ; stayed there only one year, and at the other little schools till twelve years old. " When I came from the last of them, all the acquisition I had made was to be able to construe a little of Tully's Offices." — Pope. My next period was in Windsor Forest, where I sat down with an earnest desire of reading, and applied as constantly as I possibly could to it for some years. I was between twelve and thirteen when I first went thither, and continued in this close pursuit of pleasure and languages till nineteen or twenty. Considering how very little I had when I came from school, I think I may be said to have taught myself Latin, as well as French or Greek ; and in all three my chief way of getting them was by translation. — P. Mr. Pope thought himself the better in some respects for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular) read originally from the sense ; whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words. — P. He set to learning Latin and Greek by himself, about twelve; and when he was about fifteen he resolved that he would go up to London to learn French and Italian. We in the family looked upon it as a wildish sort of resolution ; but as his health would not let him travel, we could not see any reason for it. He stuck to it ; went thither ; and mastered both those languages with a surprising dispatch. Almost every- BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 123 thing of this kind was of his own acquiring. He had had masters indeed, but they were very indifferent ones ; and what he got was almost wholly owing to his own unassisted industry. — Mannick. Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were Mr. Pope's great favour- ites in the order they are named, in his first reading till he was about twelve years old. — Pope. He was a child of particularly sweet temper, and had a great deal of sweetness in his look, when he was a hoy.— Mannick. This is very evident in the picture drawn for him when about ten years old; in which his face is round, plump, pretty, and of a fresh complexion. I have often heard Mrs. Pope say that he was then exactly like that picture. I have often been told that it was the perpetual application he fell into about two years afterwards that changed his form and ruined his constitution. The laurel branch in that picture was not inserted originally, but was added long after by Jervas. — M. Mr. Pope's life, that was so valuable to the world, was in danger several times ; and the first so early as when he was a child in coats. A wild cow that was driven by the place where he was at play struck at him with her horns ; tore off his hat ; wounded him in the throat ; beat him down, and trampled over him. — Airs. Racket, his sister, who was older than him, and was by when it happened.^ His second escape was when he was about two-and-twenty. He was travelling in a coach by night, and with a coachman 124 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. that did not know the road so well as he should have done. They were to cross the Thames, and the coachman drove into the water ; but after they were a little way in the horses stopped short, and all his swearing and whipping could not make them stir a foot on. Some passengers that happened to come by just in the height of his endeavouring to force them to go on called to the man and told him that his horses had more sense than himself; that the Thames was not fordable there ; that they were just on the brink of a hole twice as deep as the coach ; and that if they had proceeded a step farther they must all have been lost. So he drew back, got out of the river again, and they were very glad to lie at a little alehouse on the bank they had just quitted. — Pope. His third danger was in a coach too, with six spirited horses. They took fright, ran away, and overturned the coach, with him only in it, into a ditch full of water. He was almost suffocated there, and broke the glass with his hand to let in the air ; but as the coach sunk deeper the water came very fast upon him, and he was taken out but just time enough to save him from being drowned. — P. The accident of the cow was when my brother was about three years old. He was then filling a little cart with stones. The cow struck at him ; carried off his hat and feather with her horns, and flung him down on the heap of stones he had been playing with. In the fall he cut himself against one of them in his neck near the throat. The other accident of his being like to be killed, when he was overturned in the coach and six, was in the water just before you come to Twickenham. — Mrs. Racket. [Rather somewhere the Hounslow Heath way, for he was coming home from Dawley. — Mrs. Blount.'] BIOGRAPHlCylL ANECDOTES. 125 Besides these, his perpetual application (after he set to study of himself) reduced him in four years' time to so bad a state of health that, after trying physicians for a good while in vain, he resolved to give way to his distemper, and sat down calmly in a full expectation of death in a short time. Under this thought he wrote letters to take a last farewell of some of his more particular friends ; and among the rest, one to Abbe Southcote. The Abb^ was extremely concerned, both for his very ill state of health, and the resolution he said he had taken. He thought there might yet be hopes ; and went immediately to Dr. Radcliffe, with whom he was well acquainted, told him Mr. Pope's case, got full directions from him, and carried them down to Mr. Pope in Windsor Forest. The chief thing the doctor ordered him was to apply less, and to ride every day : the following his advice soon restored him to his health. — Pope. It was about twenty years after this that Mr. Pope heard of an Abbey's being like to be vacant in the most delightful part of France, near Avignon, and what some common friend was saying would be the most desirable establishment in the world for Father Southcote. Mr. Pope took no further notice of the matter on the spot, but sent a letter the next morning to Sir Robert Walpole (with whom he had then some degree of friendship), and begged him to write a letter to Cardinal Fleury to get the Abbey for Southcote. The affair met with some delay (on account of our Court having just then settled a pension on Father Courayer), but succeeded at last, and South- cote was made Abbot. — P. Mr. Pope said that he was seven years unlearning what he had got (from about twenty to twenty-seven). He should have 126 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. travelled had it not been for his ill-health (and on every occasion that offered had a desire to travel, to the very end of his life). His first education was at the seminary at Twiford, near Winchester. — P. Mr. Pope's father (who was an honest merchant, and dealt in Hollands wholesale) was no poet, but he used to set him to make English verses when very young. He was pretty difficult in being pleased, and used often to send him back to new turn them. "These are not good rhimes;" for that was my husband's word for verses. — Mr. Popis Mother. I believe nobody ever studied so hard as my brother did. He did nothing else but write and read. — Mrs. Racket. I wrote things — I'm ashamed to say how soon. Part of an epic poem when about twelve. Deucalion was the hero of it. The scene of it lay at Rhodes and some of the neighbouring islands ; and the poem opened under water with a description of the Court of Neptune. That couplet on the circulation of the blood in the Diinciad was originally in this poem, word for word as it is now. — P. " I began writing verses of my own invention farther back than I can well remember." Ogilby's translation of Homer was one of the first large poems that ever Mr. Pope read ; and he still spoke of the pleasure it then gave him, with a sort of rapture, only in reflecting on it. " It was that great edition with pictures. I was then about eight years old. This led me to Sandy's Ovid, which I liked extremely ; and so I did a translation of part of Statius, by some very bad hand." — P. J BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 127 When I was about twelve I wrote a kind of play, which I got to be acted by my school-fellows. It was a number of speeches from the Iliad^ tacked together with verses of my own. The epic poem which I began a little after I was twelve was "Alcander, Prince of Rhodes." There was an under-water scene in the first book : it was in the Archipelago. I wrote four books toward it of about a thousand verses each, and had the copy by me till I burnt it by the advice of the Bishop of Rochester, a little before he went abroad. — P. The Deucalion in my epic poem was a second Deucalion, not the husband of Pyrrha. I had flung all my learning into it, as indeed Milton has done too much in his " Paradise Lost." The Bishop of Rochester, not many years ago, advised me to burn it. I saw his advice was well grounded, and followed it, though not without some regret. — P. I endeavoured (said he, smiling) in this poem to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece : there was Milton's style in one part, and Cowley's in another ; here the style of Spenser imitated, and there of Statins ; here Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudian. " It was an imitative poem then, as your other exercises were imitations of this or that story ? " " Just that."— P. Mr. Pope wrote verses imitative of sounds so early as in this epic poem — " Shields, helms, and swords all jangle as they hang, And sound formidinous with angry clang." Was a couplet of this nature in it ? — There were also some 128 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. couplets in it which I have since inserted in some of my other poems without any alteration, as in the "Essay on Criticism" — " Whose honours with increase of ages grow ; As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow." Another couplet inserted in the Dunciad already mentioned, and I think he said the same of that simile — *' As clocks to weight their nimble motion owe. The wheels above urged by the load below." — Spence. In the scattered lessons I used to set myself about that time, I translated above a quarter of the " Metamorphoses," and that part of Statius which was afterwards printed with the corrections of Walsh. — Pope. My epic was about two years in hand (from thirteen to fifteen). Alcander was a prince driven from his throne by Deucalion, father of Minos, and some other princes. It was better planned than Blackmore's " Prince Arthur," but as slavish an imitation of the ancients. Alcander showed all the virtue of suffering, like Ulysses ; and of courage, like .^neas or Achilles. Apollo, as the patron of Rhodes, was his great defender ; and Cybele, as the patroness of Deucalion and Crete, his great enemy. She raises a storm against him in the first book, as Juno does against ^neas ; and he is cast away and swims ashore just as Ulysses does to the island Phasacia. —P. " It was while I lived in the Forest that I got so well 1 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 129 acquainted with Sir William Trumbull, who loved very much to read and talk of the classics in his retirement. We used to take a ride out together, three or four days in the week, and at last almost every day. Another of my earliest acquaintance was Walsh. I was with him at his seat in Worcestershire for a good part of the summer of 1705, and showed him my ' Essay on Criticism' in 1706. Walsh died the year after. I was early acquainted with Lord Lansdowne, Garth, Betterton, and Wycherley, and, not long after, with St. John." — P. About fifteen I got acquainted with Mr. Walsh. He used to encourage me much, and used to tell me that there was one way left of excelling ; for though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct ; and he desired me to make that my study and aim. — P. This I suppose first led Mr. Pope to turn his lines over and over again so often, which he continued to do till the last, and did it with surprising facility. — Spence. Wycherley was Mr. Pope's first poet-friend, and Walsh his next. — Man7iick. My next work after my Epic was my Pastorals ; so that I did exactly what Virgil says of himself — " Cum canerem reges et proelia Cynthius aurem Vellit et admonuit ; pastorem Tityre pingues Pascere oportet oves; deductum dicere carmen." Eclog. vi. 3. — Fope. I translated Tully's piece De Seneduie in this early period, and there is a copy of it in Lord Oxford's library. — P. 719 I30 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. My first taking to imitating was not out of vanity, but humility. I saw how defective my own things were, and endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good strokes from others. — P. " I have often mention'id my great reading period to you. In it I went through all the best critics" — this probably led him to writing his " Essay on Criticism" at that period — "almost all the English, French, and Latin poets of any name : the minor poets, Homer, and some of the gretiter Greek poets, in the original ; and Tasso and Ariosto in translations. I even then liked Tasso better than Ariosto, as I do still ; and Statins of all the Latin poets by much next to Virgil." — P. I was born in the year 1688. My " Essay on Criticism" was written in 1709, and published in 171 1, which is as little time as ever I let anything of mine lay by me. — P. I wrote the "Essay on Criticism" two or three years before it was printed. — P. My grandfather Englefield, of White Knights, Oxfordshire, was a great lover of poetry and poets. He was acquainted with Mr. Pope, and admired him highly. It was at his house that I first used to see Mr. Pope. " It was after his 'Essay on Criticism' was published ?" Oh yes, sir; I was then a very little girl. My uncle used to say much of him, but I did not attend to it at that time. " Had he not a great deal of life and vivacity in his conversation then?" Yes; it was quite sur- prising. Mr. Pope used always to speak of his father as the best of men. He was a merchant that dealt in Hollands, and left off business when King William came in. He was then worth BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 131 ten thousand pounds, but did not leave so much to his son. Mr. Pope had about three or four thousand pounds from his father, as I have heard him say. He had two or three thousand pounds out on annuities, for his life, with friends. My first acquaintance with him was after he had begun the Iliad.- — Mrs. Blotmt. The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor's hair was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance and well-wisher to both desired me to write a poem, to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the " Rape of the Lock," which was well received, and had its effect in the two families. Nobody but Sir George Brown was angry, and he was a good deal so, and for a long time. He could not bear that Sir Plume should talk nothing but non- sense. Copies of the poem got about, and it was like to be printed ; on which I published the first draught of it (without the machinery) in a Miscellany of Tonson's. The machinery was added afterwards, to mJ"'^ it look a little more consider- able, and the scheme of adding it was much liked and approved of by several of my friends, and particularly by Dr. Garth, who, as he was one of the best natured men in the world, was very fond of it. — P. [I have been assured by a most intimate friend of Mr. Pope's that the peer in the "Rape of the Lock" was Lord Petre ; the person who desired Mr. Pope to write if, old Mr. Caryl, of Sussex ; and that what was said of Sir George Brown in it was the very picture of the man. — Spe)icei\ Mr. Pope learned to draw of Jervas for a year and a half (With what pleasure he stole some strokes, in Tilleman's 132 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES, absence, in the landscape he was drawing at Lord Radnor's.) " Which gives you the most pleasure, sir, poetry or painting ? " " I really can't well say ; both of them are extremely pleasing." —P. I have seen, of Mr. Pope's drawing, a grave old Chaucer from Occleve ; a Betterton ; a Lucius Verus, large profile ; two Turkish heads; a Janizary from the life; Antinous; and St. John praying. — Spence. Mr, Addison wrote a letter to Mr. Pope, when young, in which he desired him not to list himself under either party. "You," says he, "who well deserve the praise of the whole nation, should never content yourself with the half of it."— Pope. Lord Lansdowne insisted on my publishing "Windsor Forest," and the motto {non injussa cafio) shows it. — P. What terrible moments does one feel after one has engaged for a large work! In the beginning of my translating the Iliad, I wished anybody would hang me, a hundred times. It sat so heavily on my mind at first, that I often used to dream of it, and do sometimes still. When I fell into the method of trans- lating thirty or forty verses before I got up, and piddled with it the rest of the morning, it went on easy enough ; and when I was thoroughly got into the way of it, I did the rest with pleasure. — P. [He used to dream that he was engaged in a long journey, puzzled which way to take, and full of fears that he should never get to the end of it. — SpenceJ\ BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 133 The Iliad took me up six years; and during- that time, and particularly the first part of it, I was often under great pain and apprehension. Though I conquered the thoughts of it in the day, they would frighten me in the night. I sometimes still even dream of being engaged in that translation ; and got about half way through it: and being embarrassed and under dread of never completing it. — P. If I had not undertaken that work, I should certainly have writ an epic; and I should have sat down to it with this advan- tage, that I had been nursed up in Homer and Virgil.— P. I should certainly have written an epic poem if I had not engaged in the translation of Homer. — P. In translating both the Iliad and the Odyssey, my usual method was to take advantage of the first heat; and then to correct each book, first by the original text, then by other translations; and lastly, to give it a reading for the versification only. — P. [How much he has corrected, and in what manner, may be seen by the original manuscriptsof each : which are bound up; that of the Iliad in two volumes, and that of the Odyssey in one. From the MS. of the latter, it appears how truly he says "that he translated twelve books of it." That volume contains the first draught of the third, fifth, seventh, and ninth books ; part of the tenth, from " now dropt our anchors in the ocean bay," verse 157 to the end; the thirteenth and fourteenth ; part of the fifteenth, from " meantime the King Eumasus and the rest," verse 321 to the end; and the seven- teenth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-fourth: that is, ten books entire and part of two others, which, with his great corrections in Broome's part (without reckoning some 134 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. manuscript of his own, which is lost), would make up tlie compass of twelve books at \Q,diS\..—Spcnce^ When I was looking on his foul copy of the Iliad, and ob- serving how very much it was corrected and interlined, he said, " I believe you would find upon examination that those parts which have been the most corrected read the easiest."— P. [I read only the first page, in which . . . 1) /j.vpi' Ax^'-oiS d\ye iOi}Ke' IloXXas 5' l^9i/j,ov$ i/'uxas "Ai'St irpota.^pev "RpdlMV was thus translated — That strow'd with warilors dead the Phrygian plain, And peopled the dark shades with heroes slain. It now stands ihus — That wrath which hitrled to Pluto's gloomy reign The souls of mighty chiefs tmtiviely slain. And was evidently altered to preserve the sense of the v/oid irpo'Ca^ev. What a useful study might it be for a poet to com- pare in those parts what was written first with the successive alterations ; to learn his turns and arts in versification ; and to consider the reasons why such and such an alteration was made. — Spence.'] The famous Lord Hallifax (though so much talked of) was rather a pretender to taste than really possessed of it. When I had finished the two or three first books of my translation of the Iliad, that lord " desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house." Addison, Congreve, and Garth were BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 135 there at the reading. In four or five places Lord Ilallifax stopped me very civilly, and with a speech each time much of the same kind — " I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me. Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little more at your leisure. I am sure you can give it a better turn." I returned from Lord Hallifax with Dr. Garth in his chariot, and as we were going along was saying to the doctor that my lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty by such loose and general observations ; that I had been thinking over the pas- sages almost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of them. Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment ; said I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Hallifax to know his way yet; that I need not puzzle myself in looking those places over and over when I got home. "All you need do (said he) is to leave them just as they are ; call on Lord Hallifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages, and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event." I followed his advice ; waited on Lord Hallifax some time after ; said I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed ; read them to him exactly as they were at first. His lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, "Ay, now, Mr. Pope, they are perfectly right ! Nothing can be better." — Pope. I had once a design of giving a taste of all the most cele- brated Greek poets, by translating one of their best short pieces at least from each of them. A hymn of Homer, another of Callimachus, an ode or two from Pindar, and so on. And I should have done so had not I engaged in the translation of 136 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. the Iliad. What led me into that, which was a work so much more laborious, and less suited to my inclination, was purely the want of money. I had then none, not even to buy books. — Pope. I had all the subscription money clear for the Iliad^ and Tonson was at all the expense of printing, paper, etc., for the copy. An author who is at all the expense of publishing ought to clear two-thirds of the whole profit into his own pocket. — Pope. [For instance, as he explained it, in a piece of one thousand copies, at three shillings each to the common buyer, the whole sale at that rate will bring in one hundred and fifty pounds ; the expense therefore to the author for printing, paper, publishing, selling, and advertising, should be but fifty pounds, and his clear gain should be one hundred pounds. — Spence^ I had twelve hundred pounds for my translation of the Iliad, and six hundred for the Odyssey, and all the books for my subscribers and presents into the bargain. — P. Lang did the eighth or tenth book of the Odyssey, and Mr. Pope gave him a twenty-two guinea medal for it. — Wilson, of Balliol College. Lord Oxford was always dissuading me from engaging in the work \i.e., the Iliad\ He used to compliment me by saying that " so good a writer ought not to be a translator." He talked always very kindly to me, and used often to express his concern for my continuing incapable of a place, which I could not make myself capable of without giving a great deal of pain to my parents — such pain, indeed, as I would not have given to either of them for all the places he could have bestowed upon me. — P. BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 137 That lord never said anything of a pension to me, and it was to the Whig Ministry that I was wholly obliged for any thoughts of that kind.—/*. In the beginning of George the First's reign, Lord Hallifax sent for me of his own accord. He said he had often been concerned that I had never been rewarded as I deserved ; that he was very glad it was now in his power to be of service to me ; that a pension should be settled on me, if I cared to accept it ; and that nothing should be demanded of me for it. I thanked his lordship in general terms, and seemed to want time to consider it. I heard nothing further for some time; and about three months after I wrote to Lord Hallifax, to thank him for his most obliging offer ; saying that I had considered the matter over fully, and that all the difference I could find in having or not having a pension was, that if I had one, I might live more at large in town, and that if I had not, I might live happily enough in the country. There was some- thing said too of the love of being quite free, and without anything that might even look like a bias laid on me. So the thing dropped, and I had my liberty without a coach. — P. Craggs, afterwards, went farther than this. He told me as a real friend, that a pension of three hundred pounds a year was at my service, and that, as he had the management of the secret service money in his hands, he could pay me such a pension yearly without any one's knowing that I had it. I declined even this ; but thanked Mr. Craggs for the heartiness and sincerity of his friendship, told him that I did not much like a pension any way; but that, since he had so much good- ness towards me, if I should want money, I would come to him for a hundred pounds, or even for five hundred, if my wants 138 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. ran so high.— P. [I do not find that he ever did go to Mr. Craggs for anything, after all, and have been assured by some of his friends, who knew his private affairs the most intimately, that they think he never did. — Spence.] Craggs was so friendly as to press this to me several times, and always used to insist on the convenience that a coach would be of to me, to incline me to accept of his kind offer. 'Tis true, it would have been very convenient ; but then I considered that such an addition to my income was very uncertain, and that if I had received it, and kept a coach for some time, it would have made it more inconvenient for me to live without one, whenever that should fail. — F. My brother does not seem to know what fear is. When some of the people that he had put into his Dunciad were so much enraged against him, and threatened him so highly, he loved to walk out alone, and particularly went often to Mr. Fortescue's at Richmond. Only he would take Bounce with him ; and for some time carried pistols in his pocket. He used then to say when we talked to him about it, that with pistols the least man in England was above a match for the largest.-:— yT/ri". Racket. [After the first edition of the Dunciad, and while Mr. Pope was preparing another yet more irritating, I took the opportunity one morning when I had been reading some things to him out of Bayle's Dictionary, in his study, to turn to the article Bruschius, a poet of Bohemia, who, when he was going to publish a satire against some of the blockheads of that country, was waylaid in a wood and murdered by them. Something of the same nature had been hinted at, as to Ham Walk.^ I read the article to Mr. Pope, and said some things BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 139 that I thought my friendship obHged me to say, about his venturing so often to Richmond alone. He said that the people I mentioned were low and vile enough, perhaps, to be capable of such designs ; but that he should not go a step out of his way for them ; for, let the very worst that I could imagine happen, he thought it better to die than to live in fear of such rascals. — Spe?ice.'\ When my brother's faithful dog and companion in these walks died, he had some thoughts of burying him in his garden, and putting a piece of marble over his grave, with the epitaph, O RARE BOUNCE ! and he would have done it, I believe, had not he apprehended that some people might take it to have been meant as a ridicule of Ben Jonson. — Mrs. R. When I had a fever, one winter in town, that confined me to my room for five or six days, Lord Bolingbroke, who came to see me, happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table ; and in turning it over, dipped on the first satire of the second book, which begins, Sunt qttibiis in saiird, etc. He observed, how well that would hit my case, if I were to imitate it in English. After he was gone, I read it over ; translated it in a morning or two, and sent it to the press in a week or a fort- night after. And this was the occasion of my imitating some otlier of the satires and epistles afterwards. — P. [To how casual a beginning are we obliged for some of the most delightful things in our language ! When I was saying to him that he had already imitated a third part of Horace's Satires and Epistles, and how much it was to be wished that he would go on with them, he could not believe that he had gone near so far ; but, upon computing it, it appeared to be above a third. He 140 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. seemed on this not disinclined to carry it further ; but his last illness was then growing upon him, and robbed us of him and all hopes of that kind in a few months after. — Spence?^ I have imitated more than are printed; and particularly the fourth satire of the second book. Before this hint from Lord Bolingbroke, I had translated the first satire of the first book. But that was done several years ago, and in quite a different manner. It was much closer and more like a downright translation. — P. On somebody's coming to see him in his illness who said " they heard he was going to put his faith in a new physician," he said : " No, I have not laid aside my old physician and given myself up to a new one ; any more than I have renounced the errors of our church, and taken up with those of yours." — P. " Here am I, like Socrates, distributing my morality among my friends just as I am dying." — P. [This was said on his sending about some of his Ethic Epistles, as presents, about three weeks before we lost him, I replied, " I really had that thought several times, when I was last at Twickenham with you ; and was apt, now and then, to look upon myself like Phgedo." That might be (said he) ; but you must not expect me now to say anything like Socrates. — Spence!\ One of the things that I have always most wondered at is that there should be any such thing as human vanity. If I had any, I had enough to mortify it, a few days ago ; for I lost my mind for a whole day. — P. [This was said on the loth of May, and the day he spoke of was the Sunday before, May 6th. A BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 141 day or two after he complained of that odd phenomenon (as he called it) of seeing everything in the room as through a curtain. On the 14th he complained of seeing false colours on objects. — Spence^ The 15th, on Mr. Lyttleton's coming in to see him, he said, " Here am I, dying of a hundred good symptoms 1 " [This was just after Dr. T. had been telling him that he was glad to find that he breathed so much easier ; that his pulse was very good, and several other encouraging things. — Spence.'\ The thing that I sufter most from is, that I find I cannot think.— P. He said to me, " What's that ?" pointing into the air with a very steady regard ; and then looked down on me, and said, with a smile of great pleasure, and with the greatest softness, "'Twas a vision." — Spence. I had got the Regent's edition of the Longus's DapJmis and Chloe in my hand to read while he was dozing. "They are very innocent loves, like those of Adam and Eve in Milton (said he). I wonder how a man of so infected a mind as the Regent could have any taste for such a book." — P. The greatest hero is nothing under a certain state of the nerves. His mind is like a fine ring of bells, jangled and out of tune. — Lord Bolingbroke. [He himself has been in the vapours this last month, though he always used to laugh at it before ; and that made him awake to this reflection. — Hooke.'\ There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'lis 142 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. hardly worth while to be here at all ! — Lord B. [His lordship's melancholy attitude on the morning of the 21st was remarkable, leaning against Mr. Pope's chair, and crying over him for a considerable time, with more concern than can be expressed. — Spe/2ce.'\ On the 27th, speaking of his having so little to leave, he quoted two of his own verses very properly, on his whole life having been divided between carelessness and care.* — Hooke. It was on this same day that he requested to be brought to the table where we were sitting at dinner. His appearance was such that we all thought him dying. Mrs. Anne Arbuthnot involuntarily exclaimed, " Lord, have mercy upon us ! this is quite an Egyptian feast." — Spence. " Oh, great God ! what is man ? " said Lord B., looking on Mr. Pope, and repeating it several times, interrupted with sobs. Upon Mr. Cheselden saying, " There is no hope for him here ; our only hope for him must be " Lord Bolingbroke said, " Pshaw I we can only reason from what is ; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities." When I was telling his lordship that Mr. Pope, on every catching and recovery of his mind, was always saying something kindly either of his present or his absent friends ; and that this was so surprising that it seemed to me as if his humanity had outlasted his understanding. Lord B. said, " It has so;" and then added, " I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind." "I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's love than " [Sinking his head 1 and losing his voice in tears. — Spence.'] BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 143 A short time before his death Mr. Pope said, " I am so certain of tlie soul's being immortal that I seem to feel it within me, as it were by intuition," When Mr. Hooke asked him whether he would not die as his father and jnother had done, and whether he should not send for a priest, he said, " I do not suppose it is essential, but it will look right, and I heartily thank you for putting me in mind of it." In the morning, after the priest had given him the last sacraments, he said, " There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship, and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue," When Mr. Hooke whispered this to Lord Boling- broke at table, he said aloud, "Why, to be suie, that is the whole duty of man." Mr. Pope died the 30th of May (1744) in the evening; but they did not know the exact time, for his departure was so easy that it was imperceptible even to the standers-by. May our END BE LIKE HIS ! Mr. Pope never flattered anybody for money in the whole course of his writing. Alderman Barber had a great inclination to have a stroke in his commendation inserted in some part of Mr. Pope's writings. He did not want money, and he wanted fame. He would probably have given four or five thousand pounds to have been gratified in this desire, and gave Mr. Pope to understand as much, but Mr. Pope vyould never comply with such a baseness. And when the Alderman died he left him a legacy only of a hundred pounds, which might have 144 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. been some thousands, if he had obliged him only with a couplet. — Mr. Wai burton, who had it from Mr. Pope, and 1 have been assured of it by others who /cnew both Mr. Pope and the Aider/nan Tery welt. " I have drawn in the plan for my Ethic Epistles much narrower than it was at first." He mentioned several of the particulars in which he had lessened it ; but as this was in the year 1734, the most exact account of his plan (as it stood then) will best appear from a leaf which he annexed to about a dozen copies of the poem, printed in that year, and sent as presents to some of his most particular friends. Most of these were afterwards called in again ; but that which was sent to Mr. Bethel was not. It ran as follows — INDEX TO THE ETHIC EPISTLES. Book I. Of the Nature and State of Man. Epistle I. — With respect to the Universe. 2. — As an Individual. 3. — With respect to Society. 4. — With respect to Happiness. Book II. Of the Use of Things. Of the Limits of Human Reason. Of the Use of Learning. ' OftheUseofWit. Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men. Of the particular Characters of Women. Of the Principles and Use of Civil and Ecclesiastical Polity. BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 145 Of the Use of Education. A View of the Equality of Happiness in the several Conditions of Men. Of the Use of Riches. The things that I have written fastest have always pleased the most. I wrote the "Essay on Criticism" fast, for I had digested all the matter in prose before I began upon it in verse. "The Rape of the Lock" was written fast ; all the machinery was added afterwards; and the making that, to what was pub- lished before, hit so well together, is, I think, one of the greatest proofs of judgment of anything I ever did. I wrote most of the Iliad fast ; a great deal of it on journeys, from the little pocket Homer on that shelf there ; and often forty or fifty verses in a morning in bed. The Dunciad cost me as much pains as anything I ever wrote. — Pope. In the "Moral Poem" I had written an address to our Saviour, imitated from Lucretius's compliment to Epicurus, but omitted it by the advice of Dean Berkley. One of our priests, who are more narrow-minded than yours, made a less sensible objection to the Epistle on Happiness. He was very angry that there was nothing said in it of our eternal happiness hereafter, though my subject was expressly to treat only of the state of man here. — P. The four first epistles are the scale for all the rest of the work, and were much the most difficult part of it. I don't know whether I shall go on with the Epistles on Government and Education. — P. [He spoke a little warmer as to the use of it than before, but more coldly as to the execution. — Spence?^ 720 146 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. I have omitted a character (though I thought it one of th.j best I had ever written) of a very great man who had every- thing from without to make him happy, and yet was very miserable, from the want of virtue in his own heart.—/*. [Though he did not say who this was, it seemed' to have been that of the Duke of Marlborough. He mentioned Julius Csesar and the late King of Sardinia as instances of a Hke kind.— ^-.j Count Osorio has given me two reasons for the King of Sardinia's quitting the crown. He said he thought it was either from his previous engagements and foresight of the war between France and the Empire, or else from his beginning madness and apprehension that he should misbehave. — P. When there was so much talk about the Duke of Chandos being meant under the character of Timon, Mr. Pope wrote a letter to that nobleman (I suppose to point out some particu- lars which were incompatible with his character). The Duke, in answer, said " he took the application that had been made of it as a sign of the malice of the town against himself," and seemed very well satisfied that it was not meant for him. — P. Many people would like my Ode on Music better if Dryden had not written on that subject. It was at the request of Mr. Steele that I wrote mine; and not with any thought of rivalling that great man whose memory I do and always have reverenced. — P. My letter to Mr. Addison on a " Future State" was designed as an imitation of the style of the Spectators, and there are i BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 147 several cant phrases of the Spectator in it. — P. [As " Scale of Beings," and some others which he mentioned.] My letters to Cromwell were written with a design that does not generally appear; they were not written in sober sadness. — P. I have so much of the materials of the Memoirs of Scriblerus ready, that I could complete the first part in three or four days. — P. The French translation of my " Essay on Man " gives the sense very well, and lays it more open, which may be of good service to Mr. Dobson in any passages where he may find him- self obliged to enlarge a little. — P. [About this time (1736) Lord Oxford was very desirous of having the " Essay on Man " translated into Latin verse. Mr. Dobson had got a great deal of reputation by his translation of Prior's " Solomon." On my mentioning something of the difficulties which would attend the translation of his essay, Mr. Pope said, " \l any man living could do it, Dobson could.'' And by his desire I engaged that gentleman to undertake it. Lord Oxford was to give him a hundred guineas for it. He began upon it, and I think trans- lated all the first epistle. What I showed of it to Lord Oxford and Mr. Pope was very well approved of. It was then that Mr. Benson offered to give the same gentleman a thousand pounds if he would translate Milton's " Paradise Lost." He told me of that offer, as inclined to close with it if he could; and on my mentioning it to Lord Oxford and Mr. Pope, they readily released him from his first engagement, and so left him at full liberty to enter upon the other. — Spence^ When I was very young I wrote something towards a tragedy, and afterwards an entire one. The latter was built 148 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. on a very moving story in the legend of St. Genevieve. After I had got acquainted with the town, I resolved never to write anything for the stage, though I was solicited by several of my friends to do so, and particularly by Betterton, who (among other things) would have had me turn my early Epic Poem into a tragedy. I had taken si'ch strong resolutions against any- thing of that kind from seeing how much everybody that did write for the stage was obliged to subject themselves to the players and the town. — P. Everybody thought Mr. Pope worth a great deal more than he left behind him. What was over, after paying legacies, etc., did not amount to two thousand pounds (besides the thousand pounds left to her and mentioned in the will). He did not know anything of the value of money, and his greatest delight was in doing good offices for his friends. I used to know by his particular vivacity, and the pleasure that appeared in his face, when he came to town on such errands, or when he was employed on them, which was very often. You knew his mother, and how good a woman she was. — Mrs. Blount. Mr. Pope's not being richer may be easily accounted for. He never had any love for money, and though he was not extravagant in anything, he always delighted when he had any sum to spare to make use of it in giving, lending, building, and gardening; for those were the ways in which he disposed of all the overplus of his income. If he was extravagant in anything it was his grotto, for that from first to last cost him above a thousand pounds. — Mrs. Blount. 'Tis most certain that nobody ever loved money so little as my brother. — Mrs. Rackety speaking of Mr. Pope. BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 149 I had never read his will ; but he mentioned to me the part relating to Mr. Allen, and I advised him to omit it, but could not prevail on him to do so. I have a letter of his by me on that subject. I sent it to Mr. Hooke.— 1/rj. B. [May 27, 1749. I read over the parts of the conversations that related to Mr. Pope's life and character to Mrs. Blount, and had several things confirmed, and some few corrected and altered in the book itself. — Spence.^ Speaking of the Aliens, she said : " They had often invited me to their house ; and as I went to Bristol with Lady [Gerard] for some time while Mr. Pope was with them, I took that opportunity of paying the visit they had desired. I soon observed a strangeness of behaviour in them. They used Mr. Pope very rudely, and Mr. Warburton with double complaisance (to make their ill usage of the other more apparent); me they used very oddly, in a stiff and over civil manner. I asked Mr. Pope, after I had been there three or four days, whether he had observed their usage of him. He said he had taken no notice of it ; but a day or two afterwards he said " that the people had got some odd thing or other in their heads.'' This oddness continued (or rather increased) as long as we stayed. Some time after Mr. Allen came to London, and I asked Mr. Pope whether he had ever inquired into the cause of their behaviour. He had not ; and I urged him to clear it up. In urging this, I used the word satisfaction. Mr. Hooke, who was by, took this in the genteel sense of the word, and imagined I would have had Mr. Pope fight Mr. Allen, which I declare was not the least in my thoughts. It was this which Mr. H. gave as the cause of his estrangement from Mrs. Blount to herself. All she wanted to know was why they were so ill-used. — Mrs. B. 15© BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. I was always particularly struck with that passage in Homer where he makes Priam's grief for the loss of Hector break out into anger against his attendants and sons ; and could never read it without weeping for the distress of that unfortu- nate old prince. — P. [He read it then, and was interrupted by his tears. — Spe7icei\ I have often seen him weep in reading very tender and melancholy passages. — Mrs. Blount. My works are now \_circa 1742] all well laid out. The first division of them contains all that I wrote under twenty-six, which may be called my Juvenilia. The second, my translations from different authors, under the same period. The third, my own works since. And the fourth, my translations and imita- tions. — P. I was first forced to print in a small form, by other printers beginning to do so from my folios ; after which all the large lay on my hands, and I have lost tv.o or three hundred pounds by it. I will have no more to do with printing myself; and if the world should have a mind to a good edition of all my works, it must be from somebody that may take care of it after my death. — P. Some wonder why I did not take in the fall of man in my essay, and how the immortality of the soul came to be omitted. The reason is plain ; they both lay out of my subject, which was only to consider man as he is — in his present state, not in his past or future. — P. "Did you never mind what your angry critics published BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 151 against you ? " Never much : only one or two things at first. When I heard for the first time that Dennis had written against me it gave me some pain : but it was quite over as soon as I came to look into his book and found he was in such a passion. — P. Good part of the ballad on Lechmere and Guise was written by Mr. Pope. The ballad on the rabbit-woman, by him and Mr. Pulteney : they wrote two or three more together. — P. The idea that I have had for an epic poem of late S^circa 1743] turns wholly on civil and ecclesiastical government. The hero is a prince who establishes an empire. That prince is our Brutus from Troy ; and the scene of the establishment, England. The plan of government is much like our old original plan ; supposed so much earlier : and the religion, introduced by him, is the belief of one God, and the doctrines of morality. Brutus is supposed to have travelled into Egypt ; and there to have learnt the unity of the Deity, and the other purer doctrines afterwards kept up in the mysteries. Though there is none of it writ as yet, what I look upon as more than half the work is already done ; for 'tis all exactly planned. " It would take you up ten years ?" Oh, much less, I should think, as the matter is already quite digested and prepared. — P. What was first designed for an Epistle on Education, as part of my essay scheme, is now inserted in the fourth book of the DiiJiciadj as the subject for two other epistles (those on civil and ecclesiastical polity) will be treated more at large in my Brutus. — P. I never save anything : unless I meet with such a pressing 152 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. case as is absolute demand upon me. Then I retrench fifty pounds or so from my own expenses. As, for instance, had such a thing happened this year [1743] I would not have built my two summer-houses. — P, I would be buried in Twickenham Church, if I should fail anywhere near it : in the place where my father and mother lie. And would have no other epitaph but the words SIBIQVE OBilT, and the time, added to theirs. — P. In the list of papers ordered to be burnt were the pieces for carrying on the Memoirs of Scnblerus^ and several copies of veibcs by Dean Parnell. I interceded in vain for both. As to the latter, he said that " they would not add anything to the Dean's character." — P. The " Epistle on his Dancing-master," and all the fragments of the Memoirs of Scriblerus are destroyed. — Dr. Warburton. It was that stanza in Spenser that I at first designed for my motto to the Dunciad. — P. " As gentle shepherd in sweet even-tide When ruddy Phoebus 'gins to walk in west, High on a hill (his flocks to vewen wide) Marks which do bite their hasty supper best : A cloud of cumbrous gnats do him molest, All striving to enfix their feeble stings, That from their 'noyance he nowhere can rest: But with his clownish hands their tender wings, He brusheth oft ; and oft doth mar their murmurings." [I remember this was written down in the first MS. copy of I BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 153 the Dunciad. It hits the little impertinent poets that were brushed away by that poem very well ; but fails in other points (as "with his clownish hands" in particular), and therefore I suppose was omitted by him. — Spefice.l After reading a canto of Spenser two or three days ago to an old lady, between seventy and eighty years of age, she said that I had been showing her a gallery of pictures. I don't know how it is, but she said very right : there is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the "Faerie Queene" when I was about twelve with infinite delight ; and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two ago. — P. I must make a perfect edition of my works ; and then shall have nothing to do but to die. — P. I have thought it over, and am quite willing to leave this world. It is too bad to desire to stay on in it ; and my spirit will go into the hands of him who I know will not use it worse than it has deserved. — P. I would leave my things in merciful hands. I am in no con- cern whether people should say this is writ well or ill, but that this was writ with a good design. " He has written in the cause of virtue, and done something to mend people's morals." This is the only commendation I long for. — P. When Mr. Pope's nephew, who had been used to sea, refused a very handsome settlement that was offered him in the West Indies, and said that fifty pounds a year was all he wanted, and that it would make him happy, Mr. Pope (instead of using 154 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. arguments to persuade him not to refuse so advantageous a proposal) immediately offered to settle the yearly sum upon him which he said would make him happy. — Mr. Warburion. " Did you ever learn anything of music ?" Never, but I had a very good ear ; and have often judged right of the best com- positions in music by the force of that. — P. I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four books. The first, you know, is on the " Nature of Man." The second would have been on " Knowledge, and its Limits." Here would have come in an "Essay on Education," part of which I have inserted in the Dunciad. The third was to have treated of "Government," both ecclesiastical and civil; and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have said what I would have said without provoking every church on the face of the earth ; and I did not care for living always in boiling water. This part would come into my Brutus, which is all planned already, and even some of the most material speeches written in prose. The fourth would be on " Morality," in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of it, four of which have been the two extremes to each of the cardinal virtues. — P. Mr. Pope is a Whig, and wou'd be a Protestant, if his mother were dead. — Mr. Blount. I was acquainted with old men when I was young, which has brought some habits upon me that are troublesome. — P. The genteel manner of my Lord Oxford's present is well worth recording. He seemed to have forgot some money due BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 155 for subscriptions he had procured to the Homer (the amouiit about thirty guineas) ; some time after he sent a gold cup with the following inscription — Edv: Comes Oxon. Alex'>'°- Pope in memoriam Patris. The cup was worth about one hundred and fifty guineas ; and he said he did not know the sum exactly, but thought it might be about what he owed him. The Earl, his father, had never made Mr. Pope any present for his dedication ; and Mr. Pope said he was perfectly right in not doing it, so that he is a man above presents in the common way. Dean Swift's little silver cup had the following little inscription— yb;^//?^/? Swift Akx^°- Pope: Pignus Amicitice exigtiinn ingefitis. Mr. Pope desired Dr. Young to forward five guineas to poor Savage, when he was in Newgate, for the death of Sinclair; the doctor was so good as to carry it himself: and Mr. Pope afterwards told him that if Savage should be in want of necessaries, he had five more ready for his service. — Dr, Young. He [Dr. Warburton] had once a very full and free conversa- tion with Mr. Pope about changing his religion : the per- secution allowed and followed so much by the Church of Rome, he owned looked like the sign of a false church. The doctor said ; " Why then should you not conform with the religion of your country ? " He seemed, in himself, not averse to it, and replied, "There were but two reasons that kept him from it : one, that the doing so would make him a great many enemies ; and the other, that it would do nobody else any good." — Dr. Warburton. Mr. Pope was offered a very considerable sum by the 156 BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. Duchess of Marlborough, if he would have inserted a good character of the duke ; and he absolutely refused it. Read his character of the Duchess of Marlborough to her, as that of the Duchess of Buckingham ; but she spoke of it afterwards, and said she knew very well whom he meant. — Dr. W. The Duke of Marlborough's character, intended for the Fourth Epistle of the " Essay on Man," I never transcribed but for one very great personage. — Dr. W. In the " Satire on Women" there was a character of the old Duchess of Marlborough, under the name of Orsini, written before Mr. Pope was so familiar with her, and very severe. — Mrs. Arbuihnot, 1744. Speaking of my attachment to Mr. Pope, the Doctor said, " He deserved all that love from you ; for I am sure that he loved you very much, and I have heard him say so often, and with great warmth." — Dr. IV. He mentioned Mr. Pope's being so busied a few days before we lost him, in drawing up arguments for the immortality of the soul. In a fit of delirium, he rose at four o'clock, and was found in his library writing ; he had said something about generous wines helping it ; whereas spirituous liquors served only to mortalize it. — Dr. lV.,from Hooke. Mr. Pope was very angry with the vicious part of mankind, but the best natured man otherwise in the world. — Dr. W. It is perhaps singularly remarkable in Mr. Pope, that his judgment was stronger than his imagination when he was BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES. 157 young (witness his " Windsor Forest " and " Essay on Criticism " produced at that period) ; his imagination stronger than his judgment when he grew old and produced the " Essay on Man." This plainly shows that the interclouding of his mind was wholly owing to the weakness of his body (and is very agreeable to what we saw of him in his last month). It was very observable during that time that Mrs. Blount's coming in gave a new turn of spirits or a temporary strength to him. — Dr. W. Lord Granville had long wanted to pass an evening with Mr. Pope. When he at last did so, Mr. P. said that the two hours were wholly taken up by his lordship in debating and settling how the first verse in the ^ndd was to be pronounced, and whether he would say Cicero or Kikero ! This is what is meant in the two lines inserted in the Dmiciad on those learned topics. — Dr. Warburton. The first epistle is to be to the whole work what a scale is to a book of maps ; and in this I reckon lies my greatest difficulty : not only in settling and ranging the parts of it aright, but in making them agreeable enough to be read with pleasure. [This was said in May 1730 of what he then used to call his " Moral Epistles," and what he afterwards called his " Essay on Man." He at that time intended to have included in one epistle what he afterwards addressed to Lord Bolingbroke in four.]— /». PART IV. POPE'S CRITICAL OPINIONS, TABLE-TALK, ETC PART IV. CRITICAL OPINIONS, TABLE-TALK, Etc. Most little poems should be written by a plan. This method is evident in Tibullus and Ovid's elegies, and almost all the pieces of the ancients. Horace's " Art of Poetry " was probably only fragments of what he designed ; it wants the regularity that flows from the following a plan, and there are several passages in it that are hints only of a larger design. This appears as early as the twenty-third verse — " Denique sit, quod vis, simplex duntaxat et unum," which looks like the proposal of a subject on which much more was necessary to be said, and yet he goes off to another in the very next line. — Pope. A poem on a slight subject requires ihe greater care to make it considerable enough to be read. [He had been just speaking of his Dunciad.\ —P. In speaking of comparisons upon an absurd and unnatural footing, he mentioned Virgil and Homer, Corneille and Racine, the little ivory statue of Polycletes and the Colossus. Magis pares quam similes ? "Ay, that's it in one word." — P. Theie was such a real character as Morose in Ben Jonson's i6i 72t 1 62 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. time. Dryden somewhere says so ; and Mr. Pope had it from Betterton, and he from Sir William Davenant, who lived in Jonson's time, and knew the man. What trash are his works taken altogether ! — P. One might discover schools of the poets, as distinctly as the schools of the painters, by much converse in them, and a thorough taste of their manner of writing. [He had been just speaking of Voiture and Sarazin.] — P. Boileau, the first poet of the French, in the same manner as Virgil of the Latin : Malherbe iongo intervallo the second. Racine's character is justness and correctness ; Corneille's passion and life. Corneille stumbles oftener, and has greater excellencies. — P. A study should be built looking east, as Sir Henry Wotton says in his little piece on " Architecture," which is good enough, at least the best of his works. — P. The method of learning a number of incoherent words, back- ward or forward, by fixing them one by one to a range of pictures, very easy ; but even according to G. Markham, scarce of any manner of use. — P. That Idea of the Picturesque, from the swan just gilded with the sun amidst the shade of a tree over the water. — P. \o7i the Thames."] A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes. Education leads us from the admiration of beauty in natural objects to the admiration of artificial (or customary) CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 163 excellence. I don't doubt but that a thorough-bred lady might admire the stars because they twinkle like so many candles at a birth-night.—/'. As L'Esprit, La Rochefoucault, and that sort of people, prove that all virtues are disguised vices, I would engage to prove all vices to be disguised virtues. Neither, indeed, is true ; but this would be a more agreeable subject, and would overturn their whole scheme. — P. Arts are taken from nature ; and after a thousand vain efforts for improvements, are best when they return to their first simplicity. — F. A sketch or analysis of the first principle of each art, with their first consequences, might be a thing of most excellent service. Thus, for instance, all the rules of architecture would be reducible to three or four heads. The justness of the openings, bearings upon bearings, and the regularity of the pillars. — P. That which is not just in buildings is disagreeable to the eye (as a greater upon a slighter, &c.). This he called "the reasoning of the eye." — P. In laying out a garden the first thing to be considered is the genius of the place : thus at Riskin's, for example, Lord Bathurst should have raised two or three mounts ; because his situation is all a plain, and nothing can please without variety. — P. I have sometimes had an idea of planting an old Gothic i64 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC cathedral in trees. Good large poplars with their white stems (cleared of boughs to a proper height) would serve very well for the columns ; and might form the different aisles or peri- stiliums by their different distances and heights. These would look very well near ; and the dome, rising all in a proper tuft in the middle, would look as well at a distance. — P. As to the general design of Providence, the two extremes of vice may serve (like two opposite biases) to keep up the balance of things. — P. When we speak against one capital vice, we ought to speak against its opposite : a middle betwixt both is the point of virtue. — P. Perhaps we flatter ourselves when we think we can do much good : it is mighty well if we can just amuse and keep out of harm's way. — P. [This was after he had been speaking coldly of his moral work, and had been pressed to go on with it, on account of the good it might do to mankind.] Oldham is a very indelicate writer : he has a strong rage, but it is too much like Billingsgate. Lord Rochester had much more delicacy and more knowledge of mankind. — P. I read Chaucer still with as much pleasure as almost any of our poets. He is a master of manners, of description, and the first tale-teller in the true enlivened natural way. — P. There is but little that is worth reading in Gower : he wants the spirit of poetry and the descriptiveness that are in Chaucer. — P, CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 165 Mr. Sackville (afterwards first Earl of Dorset of that name) was the best English poet between Chaucer's and Spenser's time. His tragedy of Gorbodiic is written in a much purer style than Shakespeare's was in several of his first plays. Sackville imitates the manner of Seneca's tragedies very closely, and writes without affectation or bombast : the two great sins of our oldest tragic writers. The Induction in the " Mirrour for Magistrates" was written by him too, and is very good and very poetical. — P. Golding's translation of Ovid's MetamorpJtoses is a good one, considering the time it was written. It is in Alexandrine verse, as well as Phaer's Virgil. — P. Michael Drayton was one of the imitators of Spenser, and Fairfax another, Milton, in his first pieces, is an evident follower of Spenser too, in his famous " Allegro and Penseroso," and a few other pieces. — P. Webster, Marston, Goff", Kyd, and Masslnger were the persons he instanced as tolerable writers of tragedy in Ben Jonson's time. — P. Carew (a bad Waller), Waller himself, and Lord Lansdown are all of one school ; as Sir John Suckling, Sir John Mennis, and Pryor are of another. — P. Crashaw is a worse sort of Cowley; he was a follower too of Petrarch and Marino, but most of Marino. He and Cowley were good friends ; and the latter has a good copy of verses on his death. — P. 1 66 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. . About this pitch were Stanley, the author of the Lives of the Philosophers; Randolph, though rather superior ; and Sylvester, though rather of a lower form. — P. Cartwright and Bishop Corbet are of this mediocre class of poets ; and Bagnel, the author of the Counter Scuffle, might be admitted among them. — P. He mentioned Cleveland and Cartwright as equally good, or rather equally bad. What a noise was there made about the superior merits of those two writers ! Donne is superior to Randolph ; and Sir W. Davenport a better poet than Donne. [He commended Donne's Epistles, Metempsychosis, and Satires as his best things. — S."] Samuel Daniel, the historian, is unpoetical, but has good sense often. — P. Herbert is lower than Crashaw ; Sir John Beaumont higher, and Donne a good deal so. — P. Politian is one of the first-rate modern Latin poets. Molza very good. Bembo and Sadoleto write pure Latin, but are stiff and unpoetical— P. Voiture, in his letters, wants sentiment ; he wrote only to divert parties over their tea. — P. Marot D'Aceilly, Habert, De Cerisis, and La Fontaine are | all of a school.— P. Chapelain is about the rate of our Sir W. Davenant ; he has strong thoughts and no versificat ion.—/'. CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 167 Lord Rochester was of a very bad turn of mind as well as debauched. — P. [From the Duke of Buckingham, and others that knew him.] Rochester has very bad versification sometimes. — P. [He instances this from his loth Satire of Horace, his full rhymes, &c. Among the imitations in Pope and Swift's Miscellanies, that of the " City Shower" was designed by Swift to imitate Virgil's Georgic style. " The Alley," in imitation of Spenser, was written by Mr. Pope, with a line or two of Mr. Gay's in it, and the imitation of Chaucer was wholly by Mr. Pope. — P. There are three distinct tours in poetry ; the design, the language, and the versification. (To which he afterwards seemed to add a fourth — the expression, or manner of painting the humours, characters, and things that fall within your design.) — P. After writing a poem one should correct it all over, with one single view at a time. Thus, for language: if an elegy, "These lines are very good, but are not they of too heroical a strain?" and so vice versa. It appears very plainly, from comparing parallel passages touched both in the Iliad and Odyssey, that Homer did this ; and it is yet plainer that Virgil did so from the distinct styles he uses in his three sorts of poems. It always answers in him ; and so constant an effect could not be the effect of chance. — P. In versification there is a sensible difference between softness and sweetness that I could distinguish from a boy. Thus on 1 68 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. the same points Dryden will be found to be softer and Waller sweeter. It is the same with Ovid and Virgil ; and Virgil's Eclogues in particular are the sweetest poems in the world. ~P. There is this difference, among others, between soft and sweet verses : that the former may be very effeminate, whereas the latter are not at all so. — P. What the Romans called the rofunditas versuum (for I know no English word for it) is to be met with remarkably in Waller too, and particularly in his naval copy of verses, — P. You know there is nothing certain about him (we had been speaking of Homer's blindness); that life, attributed to Hero- dotus, was hardly written by that historian, and all the rest have guessed out circumstances for a life of him from his own writings. I collected everything that was worth notice, and classed it ; and then Archdeacon Parnell wrote the " Essay on his Life," which is prefixed to the Iliad. It is still stiff, and was written much stiffen As it is, I think verily it cost me more pains in the correcting than the writing of it would have done. — P. What Patei cuius says of Homer's not being blind might be said by him only for the turn of it. His book is a flimsy thing; and yet nine in ten that read it will be pleased with it. — P. Paniell's Pilgn'm is very good. The story was written originally in Spanish. — P. [Whence, probably, Howel trans- lated it in prose, and inserted it in one of his letters. — Speftce.l CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 169 It is a great fault in descriptive poetry to describe everything. The good ancients (but when I named them I meant Virgil) have no long descriptions: commonly not above ten lines, and scarce ever thirty. One of the longest in Virgil is when .^neas is with Evander, and that is frequently broke by what Evander says. — P. After reading the Persian Tales (and I had been reading Dryden's Fables just before them), I had some thought of writing a Persian Fable, in which I should have given a full loose to description and imagination. It would have been a v^ery wild thing if I had executed it, but might not have been unentertaining. — P. It might be a very pretty subject for any good genius that way to write American pastorals ; or rather pastorals adapted to the manners of several of the ruder nations as well as the Americans. I once had thought of writing such, and talked it over with Gay; but other things came in my way, and took me offfromit.— P. If I am a good poet ? (for in truth I do not know whether I am or not). But if I should be a good poet, there is one thing I value myself upon, and which can scarce be said of any of our good poets, and that is, " that I have never flattered any man, nor ever received anything of any man for my verses." — P. Lord Bolingbroke and the Bishop of Rochester (Atferbury) did not quite approve of Telemachus; and Lord Bolingbroke in particular used to say that "he could never bear the Saffron Morning, with her rosy fingers, in prose." For my own part I don't like that poetic kind of prose writing, yet I always read I70 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. Telemachus with pleasure. " That must be, then, from the good sense and spirit of humanity that runs through the whole work ?" Yes, it must be that ; for nothing else could make me forget my prejudices against the style it is written in so much as I do. — P. All gardening is landscape painting. — P. [This was spoken as we were looking upon the round of the physic garden at Oxford, and the view through it, that looks so much like a picture hung up.] Self-love would be a necessary principle in every one, if it were only to serve each, as a scale for his love to his neigh- bour. — P. Under James the First, which was absolutely the worst reign we ever had, except perhaps that of James the Second. — P. " Which, sir, do you look upon as our best age for poetry ?" — Why, the last, I think; but now the old are all gone, and the young ones seem to have no emulation among them. — P. You know I love short inscriptions, and that may be the reason why I like the epitaph on the Count of Mirandula^ so well. Some time ago I made a parody of it for a man of very opposite character — " Here lies Lord Coningsby — be civil; The rest God knows, perhaps the devil.'' —P. There is nothing more foolish than to pretend to be sure of knowing a great writer by his style. — P. [Mr. Pope seemed CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 171 fond of this opinion. I have heard him mention it several times, and he has printed it as well as said it. But I suppose he must speak of writers when they use a borrowed style, and not when they write their own. He himself had the greatest compass in imitating styles that I ever knew in any man ; and he had it partly from his method of instructing himself after he was out of the hands of his bad masters, which was at first almost wholly by imitation. Mr. Addison did not discover Mr. Pope's style in the letter on Pastorals which he published in the Guardian ; but then that was a disguised style. Mr. Pope had certainly a style of his own, which was very distinguishable. Mr. Browne, in his imitations of the styles of several different sorts of poets, has pointed it out strongly ; and Mr. Pope used to speak of those likenesses as very just and very well taken. It is much the same in writing as in painting. A painter (who has a good manner of his own, and a good talent for copying) may quite drop his own manner in his copies, and yet be very easy to be distinguished in his originals. — Spence,~\ Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England (or perhaps any country) ever produced. — P. One misfortune of extraordinary geniuses is, that their very friends are more apt to admire than love them. — P. When a man is much above the rank of men, who can he have to converse with ? — P. [He had been speaking of Lord Bacon and Lord Bolingbroke a little before. This reflection seems to have arisen in his mind in relation to one or perhaps both of them. — Spefice."] It is easy to mark out the general course of our poetry. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden are the great landmarks 172 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. for it. — P. [It is plain that he was speaking of our miscellane- ous writers, by his omitting Shakespeare, and other consider- able names in the dramatic way. His own name, added to the four he mentioned, would complete the series of our great poets in general. — SpenceJ] Chaucer and his contemporaries borrowed a good deal from the Provencal poets, the best account of whom in our lan- guage is in Rymer's piece on Tragedy. " Rymer, a learned and strict critic?" "Ay, that's exactly his character. He is generally right, though rather too severe in his opinion of the particular plays he speaks of ; and is, on the whole, one of the best critics we ever had." — P. Skelton's poems are all low and bad ; there's nothing in them that's worth reading. — P. [Mr. Cleland, who was by, added that the " Tunning of Ellinor Rummin," in that author's works, was taken from a poem of Lorenzo de Medici's. — Spence.y Creech hurt his translation of Lucretius very much by imi- tating Cowley, and bringing in turns [of expression], even into some of the most grand parts. He has done more justice to Manilius than he has to Lucretius. "That was much easier to do?" "That's true." "No, he could never be of the high age " (speaking of Manilius.) — P. Shakespeare generally used to stiffen his style with high words and metaphors for the speeches of his kings and great men : he mistook it for a mark of greatness. This is strongest in his early plays ; but in his very last, his Othello, what a forced language has he put into the mouth of the Duke of CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 173 Venice ! This was the way of Chapman, Massinger, and all the tragic writers of those days. [It was mighty simple in Rowe to write a play now, professedly in Shakespeare's style — that is, professedly in the style of a bad age.] — P. It was a general opinion that Ben Jonson and Shakespeare lived in enmity against one another. Betterton has assured me often that there was nothing in it; and that such a supposi- tion was founded only on the two parties which in their lifetime listed under one and endeavoured to lessen the character of the other mutually. Dryden used to think that the verses Jonson made on Shakespeare's death had something of satire at the bottom; for my part I can't discover anything like it in them.—/'. Milton's style, in his " Paradise Lost," is not natural ; 'tis an exotic style. As his subject lies a good deal out of our world, it has a particular propriety in those parts of the poem ; and when he is on earth, wherever he is describing our parents in Paradise, you see he uses a more easy and natural way of writing. Though his formal style may fit the higher parts of his own poem, it does very ill for others who write on natural and pastoral subjects. Philips, in his " Cyder,'' has succeeded extremely well in his imitation of it, but was quite wrong in endeavouring to imitate it on such a subject. — P. Milton was a great master of the Italian poets ; and I have been told that what he himself wrote in Italian is in exceeding good Italian. I can't think that he even meant to make a tragedy of his "Fall of Man." At least I have Andreini's Adamo, and don't find that he has taken anything from it.—/'. 174 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC In Queen Elizabeth's time and a great deal lower people went from hence to Italy for manners, as they do now to France. Ascham has a severe letter upon it ; and there are many passages relating to it in Shakespeare, and several others of our old dramatic writers. — P. The Profound, though written in so ludicrous a way, may be very well worth reading seriously, as an art of rhetoric. — P. It is idle to say that letters should be written in an easy, familiar style ; that, like most other general rules, will not hold. The style, in letters as in all other things, should be adapted to the subject. Many of Voiture's letters on gay subjects are excellent ; and so are Cicero's and several of Pliny's and Seneca's on serious subjects. I do not think so ill of even Balzac as you seem to do ; there are certainly a great many good things in his letters, though he is too apt to run into affectation and bombast. The Bishop of Rochester's letter is on a grave subject (on the Value of Time), and therefore should be grave. — P. [On my having said that a friend of mine thought that letter of the Bishop's too stiff — Spence.^ Beaumont was not concerned in above four or five plays with Fletcher.— P. Hughes was a good humble-spirited man, and but a poor writer, except his play [the Siege of Damascus]— \\i2X was very well.— P. Monsieur St. Evremond would talk for ever. He was a great epicure, and as great a sloven. He lived, you know, to a great old age, and in the latter part of his life used to be always feeding his ducks, or the fowls that he kept in his chamber. '■ CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 175 He had a great variety of these and other sorts of animals, all over his house. He used always to say "that when we grow old, and our own spirits decay, it reanimates one to have a number of living creatures about one, and to be much with them."— P. Stanley's poems consist chiefly of translations, but of well chosen pieces. His treatise of the " Sentiments of the Old Philosophers " is very good. — P. Middling poets are no poets at all. There is always a great number of such in each age, that are almost totally forgotten in the next. A few curious enquirers may know that there were such men, and that they wrote such and such things; but to the world they are as if they had never been. — P. Scaliger's Poetics is an exceedingly useful book in its kind, and extremely well collected.— P. How very strange and inconclusive does the reasoning of Tully and Plato often appear to us ! and particularly that of the latter in his Phcedo. " Is there not something like a fashion in reasoning?" I believe there may, a good deal ; but with all that, there certainly is not any one of the ancients who reasons so well as our Mr. Locke, or even as Hobbes. — P. In my first setting out I never read any Art of Logic or Rhetoric. I met with ocke, he was quite insipid to me. I read Sir William Temple's Essays too then, but whenever there was anything political in them I had no manner of feeling for it.— P. There is a great number of exceeding good writers among 176 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. the French. They don't indeed think so closely, or speak so clearly, as Locke ; but they think and speak better than most of our other writers. — P. I have nothing to say for rhyme, but that I doubt whether a poem can support itself without it in our language, unless it be stiffened with such strange words as are likely to destroy our language itself The high style that is affected so much in blank verse would not have been borne, even in Milton, had not his subject turned so much on such strange out-of-the- world things as it does. — P. The mass of mankind are generally right in their judgments ; at least, they have a very good mediocre taste. As to higher things, it requires pains to distinguish justly : they are not fit for the crowd ; and even to offer such to them is, as Ben Jonson says, giving caviare to the multitude. — P. No writing is good that does not tend to better mankind some way or other. Mr. Waller has said " that he wished everything of his burnt that did not drive some moral." Even in love-verses it may be flung in by the way. — P Our flattering ourselves here with the thoughts of enjoying the company of our friends when in the other world, may be but too like the Indians' thinking that they shall have their dogs and their horses there.^ — P. A metempyschosis is a very rational scheme, and would give the best solution of some phenomena in the moral world, — P. atid Mr. L. CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 177 It is vanity which makes the rake at twenty, the woildly man at forty, and the retired man at sixty. We are apt to think that best in general for which we find ourselves best fitted in particular. Everybody finds that best and most com- mendable that he is driving, whilst he is driving it ; and does not then suspect what he chooses afterwards to be half so good. If a man saw all at first, it would damp his manner of acting ; he would not enjoy himself so much in his youth, nor bustle so much in his manhood. It is best for us to be short- sighted in the different stages of our life, just in the same manner as it is best for us in this world not to know how it is to be with us in the next. — P. Browne [in his ""Pipe of Tobacco"] is an excellent copyist, and those who take it ill of him are very much in the wrong. They are very strongly mannered, and perhaps could not write so well if they were not so; but still it is a fault that deserves to be pointed out. — P. There is no one study that is not capable of delighting us after a little application to it. " How true of even so dry a study as Antiquities ! " — Yes, I have experienced that myself I once got deep into Grsevius, and was taken greatly with it : so far as to write a treatise in Latin, collected from the writers in Grasvius, on the Old Buildings in Rome. It is now in Lord Oxford's hands, and has been so these fifteen years. — P. " Do you remember anything of two Capitoliums at Rome ? " Yes, there certainly were two. — P, [This he answered much more readily and directly than Mr. Holdsworth himself, who was so particularly well acquainted with Rome and its Antiquities. The former of these Capitols was built by 723 178 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. Tarquinius Priscus, near the place where the Barberini Palace now stands, and was called Capitolium vetusj the other, by the second Tarquin, on the hill, which was thence called the Capitoline hill. — Spence.l Rabelais had written some sensible pieces which the world did not regard at all. " I will write something (says he) that they shall take notice of;" and so sat down to writing nonsense. Everybody allows that there are several things without any manner of meaning in his "Pantagruel." Dr. Swift likes it much, and thinks there are more good things in it than I do. Friar John's character is maintained throughout with a great deal of spirit. His concealed characters are touched only in part, and by fits : as for example, though the King's Mistress be meant in such a particular related of Gargantua's mare, the very next thing that is said of the mare will not perhaps at all apply to the Mistress.—/". Butler set out on too narrow a plan, and even that design is not kept up. He sinks into little true particulars about the Widow, etc. The enthusiastic Knight, and the ignorant Squire, over-religious in two different ways, and always quarrelling together, is the chief point of view in it. — P. [Hudibras's character is that of an enthusiast for liberty, and so high and general a one, that it carries him on to attempt even the delivery of bears that are in chains. — Mr. Z.] " I can't conceive how Dinocrates could ever have carried his proposal of forming Mount Athos into a statue of Alexander the Great into execution." For my part, I have long since had an idea how that might be done ; and if anybody would make me a present of a Welsh mountain, and pay the workmen, I CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC 179 would undertake to see it executed. I have quite formed it, sometimes, in my imagination. The figure must be in a reclining posture, because of the hollowing that would other- wise be necessary, and for the city's being in one hand. It should be a rude unequal hill, and might be helped with groves of trees for the eyebrows, and a wood for the hair. The natural green turf should be left wherever it would be necessary to represent the ground he reclines on. It should be contrived so that the true point of view should be at a considerable distance. When you were near it, it should still have the appearance of a rough mountain ; but at the proper distance such a rising should be the leg, and such another an arm. It would be best if there were a river, or rather a lake, at the bottom of it, for the rivulet that came through his other hand to tumble down the hill, and discharge itself into it.—/*. The lights and shades in gardening are managed by dis- posing the thick grove work, the thin, and the openings in a proper manner : of which the eye is generally the properest judge. Those clumps of trees are like the groups in pictures (speaking of some in his own garden). You may distance things by darkening them, and by narrowing the plantation more and more towards the end, in the same manner as they do in painting, and as 'tis executed in the little cypress walk to that obelisk.— P. There are several passages in Hobbes's translation of Homer which, if they had been writ on purpose to ridicule that poet, would have done very well. — P. [He gave several instances of it, and particularly in the very first lines, the Ichor, and the two tumblers at a feast. — Spence.'] i8o CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. In looking on the portrait of the Pope by Carlo Maratti, at Lord Burlington's, he called it "the best portrait in the world. I really do think him as good a painter as any of them," were his words. — P. When the Marquis Maffei was at Mr. Pope's at Twicken- ham, the latter showed hini the design of an Ancient Theatre at Verona. The Marquis said the artist had done very well, but that it was all a whim {Favola /) Mr. Pope begged his pardon, assured him that 'twas a reality ; and convinced him that it was so, from an allowed old writer on the Antiquities of Verona. — P. " What is your opinion of placing prepositions at the end of a sentence ?" It is certainly wrong ; but I have made a rule to myself about them some time ago, and I think verily 'tis the right one. We use them so in common conversation ; and that use will authorise one, I think, for doing the same in slighter pieces, but not in formal ones. In a familiar letter, for instance, but not in a weighty one ; and more particularly in dialogue writing, but then it must be when the people introduced are talking, and not where the author appears in his own person. —P. " I wonder how Horace could say such coarse obscene things in so polite an age, or how such an age could allow of it ? " 'Tis really a wonder, though it was the same with us in Charles the Second's time, or rather worse. However, it was not above five or six years, even in that witty reign, that it past for wit, as the saying of wicked things does among us how. I wish there were not too great remains of the former vice still, even among people of the first fashion ; but the prevailing notion CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. i8i of genteelness consisting in freedom and ease, has led many to a total neglect of decency, either in their words or behaviour. True politeness consists in being easy oneself, and making everybody about one as easy as one can. But the mistaking brutality for freedom, for which so many of our young people of quality have made themselves remarkable of late, has just the contrary effect. It leads them into the taking of liberties which often make others uneasy, and ought always to make the aggressors themselves so. — P. Somebody had been speaking of Bayle's manner in his Dictionary, upon which Mr. Pope said : " Ay, he is the only man that ever collected with so much judgment, and wrote with so much spirit at the same time." — P. 'Tis difficult to find out any fault in Virgil's Eclogues or Georgtcs. He could not bear to have any appear in his j^neid; and therefore ordered it to be burnt. — P. Virgil is very sparing in his commendations of other poets ; and scarce ever does it unless he is forced. He hints at Theocritus, because he had taken so much from him, and his subject led to it ; and does the same by Hesiod, for the same reasons. He never speaks a single word of Homer; and indeed could not do it, where some would have had him, because of the anachronism. They have blamed him for not mentioning Homer instead of Mus^us {A£n. vi. 667), without considering that then Homer must have been put into Elysium long before he was born. — P. Virgil's triumph over the Greek poets in his Georgtcs is one of the vainest things that ever was written. There are not i82 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. above two or three lines in Virgil from Hesiod's works he acknowledges imitating that poet; and would never do so for two or three lines only. Perhaps what we call Hesiod's works at present are misnamed. The "Theogony" has little pretti- nesses in it, not like the greatness of antiquity. The " Shield of Hercules " is taken from Homer's " Shield of Achilles," and there are several lines exactly the same in both. The B.n.epuv has the truest air of antiquity. Niidus ara is, I think, from the EpYwj' ; but possibly none of it is Hesiod's. — P. Virgil's great judgment appears in putting things together, and in his picking gold out of the dunghills of the old Roman writers. He borrowed even from his contemporaries, as I think Aulus Gellius tells us. The ^neid was evidently a party piece as much as " Absalom and Achitophel." I have formerly said that Virgil wrote one honest line, *' Secretosque pios, his dantem jura Catonem" and that I believe was not meant of Cato Uticensis. — P. Otho Vsenius has published a picture-book which he calls the Emblems of Horace. " Misce consiliis stultitiam brevem " is represented by Minerva leading a little short child, with a fool's cap on, by the hand. " Paulum sepultse distat inertiae celata virtus " is Virtue in a dark corner. Laziness in a sepulchre, and only a thin partition-wall between them. — P. Nil adinirari is as true in relation to our opinions of authors as it is in morality ; and one may say, (9, admiratores, servum pecus ! full as justly as O, Imitatores ! — P. The first part of Robinson Crusoe is very good. De Foe CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 183 wrote a vast many things ; and none bad, though none excellent, except this. There is something good in all he has written. — P. All the rules of gardening are reducible to three heads— the contrasts, the management of surprises, and the concealment of the bounds. " Pray, what is it you mean by the contrasts ?" The disposition of the lights and shades. '"Tis the colour- ing, then?" Just that. "Should not variety be one of the rules?" Certainly; one of the chief, but that is included mostly in the contrasts. I have expressed them all in two verses (after my manner, in very little compass), which are an imitation of Horace's Omne tulit punctum^ etc. " He gains all ends, who, pleasing confounds, Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds." — Pope. On our letting the French and Spanish fleets escape off Toulon, Mr. Pope said — " They have lost the only opportunity they have ever had. Now we may be a province to France in ten years." Speaking of the making of corrupt members of parliament, the chief wheel in government, he said — " It will never hold : it may last our lime, but our posterity must be totally undone, if we are not. Look into other states, and see how ihey have fallen round about us. The same cause will produce the same effects, and God will hardly go out of his way for the first time in favouring us." — P. If I may judge myself, I think the travelling Governor's 1-84 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. Speech one of the best things in my new editions to the Dwi- ciad.—P. [This was said a little before the fourth book of that poem was published. — Spence.} Those two lines on Alsop and Freind have more of satire than of compliment in them — " Let Freind affect to speak as Terence spoke, And Alsop never but like Horace joke " {Dintciad, iv. 224) ; though I find they are generally mistaken for the latter only. They go on Horace's old method of telling a friend some less fault, while you are commending him, and which indeed is the best time of doing so. I scarce meet with anybody that understands delicacy. — P. I am inclined to believe that we may probably have passed through states of being before this, though we are not now conscious of our having passed through them ; and may possibly pass through other stages without being conscious of this. A child does not know the design of his parents, and may think them severe while they are only endeavouring to do him good till he is fourteen or fifteen, or perhaps till he is four or five-and- twenty. It may be thus with us and our great parent ; and we may pass through as many different stages of being as they do through years before we come to the full opening of our under- standing. — P. Some of Plato's and Cicero's reasonings on the immortality of the soul are very foolish ; but the latter's less so than the former's. Without revelation it certainly is a grand peut- etre. — P. CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 185 There was not any one honest minister in all the reigns of the Stuarts, except Lord Clarendon — yes, Lord Godolphin, he was a good man, though he had underhand dealings with the Pretender at first. — P. " I pity you, sir, because you have now completed everything belonging to your garden." Why, I really shall be at a loss for the diversion I used to take in laying out and finishing things. I have now nothing left me to do, but to add a little ornament or two at the line of the Thames. — P. [His design for this was to have a swan as flying into the river on each side of the landing-place ; then the statues of two river gods reclined on the bank between them and the corner seats or temples, with " Hie placido fluit amne Meles " on one of their urns, and " Magnis ubi flexibus errat Mincius " on the other. Then two terms in the first niches in the grove work on the sides, with the busts of Homer and Virgil ; and higher, two others, with those of Marcus Aurelius and of Cicero.] "Whence is that verse on the river Meles?" In Politian's best poem, his " Ambra." — P. [He had read Politian when he was very young, and then marked down this for the best of his pieces. To anything that pleased him particularly he used then to affix this mark "i" ; and before the " Ambra," in his Politian, he added, " Optimun hoc, ut puto, Politiani opus est." He still retained the same opinion of it, though the " Ambra " seems to be more in Claudian's manner than some other pieces by the 1 86 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. same author, and particularly than his "Nutritia" ; and I should imagine is not so good as that. There were some few marks beside of a mistaken taste in Mr. Pope, from that early and unguided reading of his. He met with Statius very early, liked him much, and translated a good deal from him, and to the last he used to call him the best of all the Latin epic poets after Virgil. However, these two instances and perhaps a little more regard for Ovid's "Metamorphoses" than he might otherwise have had are the only instances I can recollect of this kind. And how soon after his first setting out he must have formed a most excellent taste, who could write so just and admirable a poem as the " Essay on Criticism " before he was twenty ! — Spence.l At this day, as much company as I have kept, and as much as I love it, I love reading better. I would rather be employed in reading than in the most agreeable conversation. — P. " I was just going to ask you a very foolish question : what should one read for.?" For! why to know facts : but I should read in a quite different manner now from what I did when I had my great early fit of reading (from about fourteen to twenty- one). Then it was only for the diversion of the story ; now it should be to make myself and others better. I would mark down — on such an occasion the people concerned proceeded in such a manner ; it was evidently wrong, and had a very ill effect ; a statesman, therefore, should avoid it, in a like case. Such an one did good, or got an honest reputation, by such an action : I would mark it down, in order to imitate it, where I had an opportunity. — P. When I was looking over some things I had brought from Italy, to pick out what might be of use in his grotto, and i CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 187 came, among the rest, to some beads and medals that had been blessed at Loretto : he laid them gently aside, and said, " Those would be good presents for a papist." — P. "The nobleman-look." Yes, I know what you mean very well : that look which a nobleman should have, rather than what they have generally now. — P. The Duke of Buckingham (Sheffield) was a genteel man ; and had a great deal the look you speak of. Wycherley was a very genteel man ; and had the nobleman-look as much as the Duke of Buckingham. — P. [He instanced it too in Lord Peterborough, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Hinchinbroke, the Duke of Bolton, and two or three more. — Spence.'] Mr, Pope has still a good memory, and that both of the sensible and local kind. When I consulted him about the Hades of the ancients, he referred immediately to Pindar's second Olympic ode, Plutarch's Treatise de hide et Osiride^ the four places that relate to it in the Odyssey (though this was so many years after he had done that translation) — Plato, Lucretius, and some others, and turned to the very passages in most of them with a surprising readiness. " Pray what is the Asphodil of Homer?" Why, I believe, if one was to say the truth, 'twas nothing else but that poor yellow flower that grows about our orchards ; and if so, the verse might thus be translated in English — " The stern Achilles Stalked through a mead of daffodillies." — P. The rule laid down in the beginning of the " Essay on Man," of reasoning only from what we know, is certainly a right one, 1 88 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. and will go a great way towards destroying all the school metaphysics ; and as the church writers have introduced so much of those metaphysics into their systems, it will destroy a great deal of what is advanced by them too. — P. At present we can only reason of the divine justice from what we know of justice in man. When we are in other scenes we may have truer and nobler ideas of it ; but while we are in this life we can only speak from the volume that is laid open before us, — P, The theological writers, from Clark down to Jacob Behmen, have all (almost equally) Platonised and corrupted the truth. That is to be learned from the Bible, as it appears nakedly there, without the wresting of commentators, or the additions of schoolmen. — P. There is hardly any laying down particular rules for writing our language ; even Dean Swift's, which seemed to be the best I ever heard, were, three in four of them, not thoroughly well grounded. In most doubts, whether a word is English or not, or whether such a particular use of it is proper, one has nothing but authority for it. Is it in Sir William Temple, or Locke, or Tillotson ? If it be, you may conclude that it is right, or at least won't be looked upon as wrong. — P. The great secret how to write well is to know thoroughly what one writes about, and not to be affected. [Or, as he expressed the same thing afterwards in other words, " To write naturally, and from one's own knowledge."] — P. There was a Lord Russell who, by living too luxuriously, had CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC 189 quite spoiled his constitution. He did not love sport, but used to go out with his dogs every day only to hunt for an appetite. If he felt anything of that he would cry out, " Oh, I have found it ! " turn short round and ride home again, though they were in the midst of the finest chase. It was this lord who, when he met a beggar, and was entreated by him to give him something because he was almost famished with hunger, called him "a happy dog !" and envied him too much to relieve him. — P. On Lord Hyde's return from his travels his brother-in-law, the Lord Essex, told him with a great deal of pleasure that he had got a pension for him. It was a very handsome one, and quite equal to his rank. All Lord Hyde's answer was, " How could you tell, my lord, that I was to be sold ? or, at least, how could you know my price so exactly?" — P. [It was on this account that Mr. Pope compliments him with that passage — " disdain, what Cornbury disdains." ■ — Spence.'\ On somebody's saying of a measure proposed, that the people would never bear it. Lord Oxford's answer was, " You don't know how far the good people of England will bear." — P. L'Estrange's excellent fable-style is abominable in his trans- lation of Josephus ; and it is the same in his imitator, Collier, as to his lighter pieces, and his translations of Marcus Anto- ninus. — P. I should not choose to employ some that could do it, to translate some of my poems into Latin, because, if they did it as they ought, it would make them good for nothing else.— /*. I90 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC " I shall be very glad to see Dr. Hales, and always love to see him, he is so worthy and good a man." Yes, he is a very good man, only I'm sorry he has his hands so much imbrued in blood. " What ! he cuts up rats ?" Ay, and dogs too ! [With what emphasis and concern he spoke it.] " Indeed, he com- mits most of these barbarities with the thought of being of use to man ; but how do we know that we have a right to kill creatures that we are so little above as dogs for our curiosity, or even for some use to us ?" — P. " I used to carry it too far ; I thought they had reason as well as we." So they have, to be sure. All our disputes about that are only disputes about words. Man has reason enough only to know what is necessary for him to know ; and dogs have just that too. " But then they must have souls too, as unperishable in their nature as ours ? " And what harm would that be to us ? —P. The old Duchess of Marlborough has given away in charities, and in presents to grand-daughters and other relatives, near three hundred thousand pounds in her lifetime. — P. The king was heard to say in the drawing-room, upon the falling of the South Sea stock — " We had very good luck, for we sold out last week." — P. Kings now (except the King of Sardinia) are the worst things upon earth. They are turned mere tradesmen : cauponantes be Hum, non belliger antes. — P. Cotta and his heir were supposed by some to have been the late and present Duke of Newcastle. " Foe to the Dryads of his father's groves." Mr. Pope did not confirm it outright CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. 191 when I mentioned it to him, but spoke of their characters in a manner that seemed not at all to disown it. — Spence. One may form some idea of the consistency of foreknowledge and free-will from the instance of a tutor and a child. If you know the temper and custom of a man thoroughly, and the circumstances of the thing offered to him, you know often how he will choose ; and his choice is not at all the less free for your foreseeing it, A man always chooses what appears best to him ; and if you certainly foresaw what would appear best to him, in any one particular case, you would certainly foresee what he would choose. — P. There never was anything so wicked as the Holy Wars. —P. The epistle on " The Use of Riches" was as much laboured as any one of my works. — P. A great lawyer, who had a very bad son, in his last will left him a legacy to such a value, and this verse of Mr. Pope's to think often of — " An honest man's the noblest work of God." — Mr. Murray {aflerwards Lord Mansfield), In talking over the design for a dictionary, that might be authoritative for our English writers, Mr. Pope rejected Sir Walter Raleigh twice as too affected. The list for prose authors (from whose works such a dictionary should be collected) was talked over several times, and quite settled. There were eighteen of them named by Mr. Pope, but four of that number were only named as authorities for familiar dialogues and writings of that kind. "Should I not write 192 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. down Hooke and Middleton ? " Ay, and I think there's scarce any more of the hving that you need name. — P. The list of writers that might serve as authorities for poetical language was begun upon twice, but left very imperfect. There were but nine mentioned, and two of those only for the burlesque style. — P. The chief difficulty in a work of this kind would He in giving definitions of the names of mixed modes. As to the names of things, they are very well ascertained. It would be difficult too to settle what should be done as to the etymologies of words. If given to all, they would be often very trifling and very troublesome ; and if given to none, we should miss some very sensible originals of words. — Mr. Warburton. There is scarce any work of mine in which the versification was more laboured than in my pastorals. — P. [The " Messiah " was his favourite above all the others.] Though Virgil in hi3 pastorals has sometimes six or eight lines together that are epic, I have been so scrupulous as scarce ever to admit above two together, even in the " Messiah." — P. There is a sweetness that is the distinguishing character of pastoral versification. The fourth and fifth syllables, and the last but two, are chiefly to be minded; and one must tune each line over in one's head to try whether they go right or not. ~P. CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC 193 Lord Sunderland used to betray all the whig-schemes to Harley ; and the Duchess of Marlborough has got a letter of his from some of Lord Oxford's people, which is a very full proof of it. She has read it to me. — P. The Duchess of Marlborough has a large and very material collection of papers; but I fear she burns such as will not make for those she loved: that was not the case with Lord Sunder- land.—/'. Facts in Ancient History are not very instructive now; the principles of acting vary so often and so greatly. The actions of a great man were quite different, even in Scipio's and Julius Caesar's times. — P. I have followed the significance of the numbers, and the adapting them to the sense, much more even than Dryden ; and much oftener than any one minds it. Particularly in the translations of Homer, where 'twas most necessary to do so: and in the Dunciad often, and indeed in all my poems. — P. The great rule of verse is to be musical ; this other is only a secondary consideration, and should not jar too much with the former. I remember two lines I wrote when I was a boy that were very faulty this way. 'Twas on something that I was to describe as passing away as quick as thought — " So swift, — this moment here, the next 'tis gone, So imperceptible the motion." — Pope, " I did not use to like that verse in the Iliad — ' He lies a lifeless load along the land ; ' 194 CRITICAL OPINIONS, ETC. perhaps from its having a liquid in almost every word in it." Ay, but that does not make it run on like a river-verse : it only weakens it. 'Tis as the thing described; nerveless and yet stiff.— i'. Mr. Pope said one day to Mr. Saville : " If I was to begin the world again, and knew just what I do now, I would never write a verse." Speaking of Dr. A. Clarke, he said, "The man will never be contented ! He has already twice as much as I ; for I am told he has a good thousand pound a year, and yet he is as eager for more preferment as ever he was. " Let Clarke make half his life the poor's support, But let him give the other half to court," was a couplet in the manuscript of the fourth book of the Dunciad; but I believe I shall omit it, though if rightly under- stood, it has more of commendation than of satire in it. The best time for telling a friend any fault he has is while you are com- mending him ; that it may have the more influence upon him. And this I take to be the true meaning of the character which Persius gives of Horace — " Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico Tangit ; et admissus circum praecordia ludit." Mr. Warburton is the greatest general critic I ever knew, the most capable of seeing through all the possibilities of things. — Pope. NOTES. I NOTES. Addison. (Page 3. ) ( I ) Mr, Addison originally designed to have taken orders. The concluding lines of the Account of the Greatest English Poets express this intention — "... Receive The last poor present that my muse can give : I leave the arts of poetry and verse To them that practise them with more success. Of greater truths I'll now prepare to tell, And so at once, dear friend, and muse farewell." Tickell is of opinion that Addison's modesty prevented him from carrying out this design, to which he was strongly importuned by his father, the Dean of Lichfield. Steele more correctly attributes his change of intention to the influence of Montague. (2) Five or six \_psalms\ that he did translate were published in the " Spectators" See particularly Nos. 441 and 453. These were published in 1 712. Addison did not resign his secretary's place until 17 18. 197 198 NOTES. (3) / ever thought him a priest in his heart. This remark recalls that of Mandeville, who, after he had spent an evening in company with Addison, declared that he was a *' parson in a tye-wig." The serious nature of the Saturday Spectators probably did much to form this idea of his character. (4) Being one evening in company with Philips. The Philips here referred to is John Philips (1676- 1708), author of the Splendid Shilling and Cyder. Like Addison, he celebrated Marl- borough's victory in a poem entitled Blenheim, published in 1705. (5) Addison wrote the first four acts of his " Cato " abroad. Tickell confirms this statement, adding that Addison "took up a design of writing a play upon the subject when he was very young at the University." Macaulay thinks Ca/o was suggested by a ridiculous play on the subject which Addison saw at Venice. (6) It was practised again, yet more successfully for "Cato." Steele refers to this packing of the house in his letter to Congreve, prefixed to the edition of The Drummer of 1722 — "I promised before it was acted, and performed my duty accordingly to the author, that I would bring together so just an audience on the first days of it, it should be impossible for the vulgar to put its success or due applause to any hazard." (7) Pope gave another and somewhat different account of the incident which this anecdote records in a letter to Sir William Trum- bull, dated the 30th April 1713— "After all the applauses of the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator." This was a severe and well-understood allusion to the attempt then recently made NOTES. 199 by the Duke of Marlborough to convert the captain-generalship into a patent ofifice to be held by himself for life. (8) Sleele has blurted it out in his angry preface against Tickell. Pope refers to the letter to Congreve already cited. Steele says — "I hope nobody will be wronged, or think himself aggrieved that I give this rejected work \^The Drummer'] where I do; and if a certain gentleman is injured by it, I will allow I have wronged him, upon this issue, that (if the reputed Translator of the First Book of Homer shall please to give us another Book) there shall appear another good judge in poetry, besides Mr. Alexander Pope, who shall like it." It should be added that recent investigations have shown that there was no foundation for the charge. (9) There had been a coldness between Mr. Addison and me for some time. Pope's relations with Addison cannot be discussed here ; but it may be pointed out that these anecdotes contain purely exparte statements, and that they are not accepted by competent critics. (See Courthope, Life of Pope, pp. 158-162 ; Addison (E. M. L. Series), chap. vii. ; and Leslie Stephen's article on Addison in the Diet, Nat. Biog., vol. i.) (10) / then subjoined the first sketch of what has been since called my satire on Addison. The earliest version of these lines appeared in the St, James' s Journal of December 15, 1722, where they were recently discovered by Mr. George A. Aitken, the accomplished biographer of Steele. (See the Academy, Feb. 9, 1889.) Here is the character of Addison as it first appeared — " If meaner Gil — n draws his venal Quill, I wish the Man a dinner, and sit still ; If Den — s rails and raves in furious Pet, I'll answer Den — s when I am in Debt. 200 NOTES. 'Tis Hunger, aud uot Malice makes tlieiu print, And who'd wage War with Bedlam or the Mint ? But was there one whom better Stars conspire To form a Bard, or raise his Genius higher, Blest with each Talent and each Art to please, Aud born to write, converse, and live with Ease ; Should such a Man, too fond to reiga alone. Bear, like the Turk, no Brother to the Throne, View him with scornful, yet with jealous Eyes, And hate for Arts which cans'd himself to rise, Damn with faint Praise, assent with civil Leer, And without sneering teach the rest to sneer ; Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. Just hint Affront and hesitate Dislike, Alike reserv'd to blame or to commend, A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious Friend, Fearing ev'n Fools, by Flatterers besieg'd And so obliging that he ne'er oblig'd ; Who, when two Wits on rival Themes contest Approves of each but likes the worst the best : Like Cato gives his little Senate Laws, And sits attentive to his own Applause ; While Wits and Templars every Sentence praise And wonder with a foolish Face of Praise : Who but must grieve if such a man there be ? Who would not weep if Ad — n were he !" The couplet referring to the rival translations was omitted when the lines were incorporated with the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and the name Atticus substituted for that of Addison. (II) " One that calls me cousin" Eustace Budgell (1686-1737) was really Addison's cousin. He was the son of Gilbert Budgell, D.D., of Exeter, by Mary, only daughter of Bishop Gulston of Bristol, whose sister was Addison's mother. " When Addison was first in town in lodgings" (says Spence), '■ Budgell NOTES. 20 1 lodged in the room over his. He walked much and was troublesome to him. One night Addison was so tired of the noise that he invited him down to sup with him; and that began their acquaintance." Addison helped his kinsman, made him his clerk, and exerted his influence to obtain more than one Oovernment appointment for him. Budgell contributed thirty-seven papers to the Spectator, signing them with the letter X. After Addison's death, he lost money in the South Sea, vainly attempted to get into Parliament, became involved in law- suits, and even found himself in the Fleet. In 1733 he falsified the will, or tampered with the estate, of Tindal, the deist. Four years later he deliberately committed suicide by drowning himself in the Thames. In his desk was found a scrap of paper bearing the lines — " What Cato did and Addisou approved Cannot be ■wrong." (12) " Oh, sir, it was quite another thing rvhen first it was brought to me ! " According to a report mentioned by Johnson, Addison corrected not only this particular Epilogue, but also many of Budgell's papers in the Spectator, and to such an extent that they were almost Addison's own. (13) And to qualify himself to he ozvnedfor her husband. This anecdote is more spiteful than true. Addison did not become Secretary of State until 17 17, a year after he married the Countess. So far from his office helping him to a wife, Mr. Leslie Stephen {Diet. Nat. Biog., i. 129) thinks " the match probably facilitated Addison's official elevation." (14) I wonder then why his letter to Sacheverell was published. An Account of the Greatest English Poets, inscribed to Henry Sacheverell, first appeared in a Miscellany in 1694. It was never republished in Addison's lifetime. 202 NOTES. Arbuthnot. (Page 15.) (i) // was begun by a club of some of the greatest wits of the age. Harley, Lord Oxford used playfully to call Swift Martin, and from this sprung Martinus Scriblerus (the name of the Club). (Carruthers' Life of Pope i second ed., p. 266.) Atterbury. (Page 17.) (i) The late king. This, of course, was George I., who died in 1727. Lockier told Spence the story somewhere about the year 1730. Betterton. (Page 20.) (X) It is because you are only telling them a story, attd I am showing them facts. ' ' Observe what a prettier way this was of putting it than that adopted by Garrick, when one of his clerical friends was similarly perplexed. * I account for it in this way,' said the latter Roscius : ' you deal with facts as if they were fictions ; I deal with fictions as if I had faith in them as facts.' " (Doran, Their Majesties^ Servants, Lowe's edition, i. p. 125.) BOLINGBROKE. (Page 22.) (l) / have heard him speak of some work of Lord Bolingbroke' s which that lord designed to suppress. On the completion of the Patriot King, Bolingbroke forwarded the MS. to Pope, requesting him to have a few copies printed, with a view to distributing them among private friends. On the death of Pope it was discovered that he had ordered the printer to strike off fifteen NOTES. 203 hundred copies — a matter concerning which he had not said a word to Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke attacked his dead friend in what he called a corrected edition of the Patriot King, published in 1749. Pope is generally held to have sinned from excessive zeal on behalf of his friend ; and no one — not even Macaulay — has been found to defend the subsequent conduct of Bolingbroke in the matter. Mr, Churton Collins, in his brilliant Essay on Bolingbroke — an Essay which is worthy in every respect of the pen of Macaulay — puts^^the truth very clearly : "That Pope acted with disingenuousness must be admitted, but his disingenuousness on this occasion originated, we are convinced, from motives very creditable to him. It was notorious that he entertained exaggerated notions of Bolingbroke's merits as a writer. . . . Afraid, therefore, that the precious treatise entrusted to him might, either by some sudden caprice on the part of the author, or by some carelessness on the part of the few who were privileged to possess it, be lost to the world, he determined to render the chance of such a catastrophe as remote as possible. . . . Hence the surreptitious impression." {Bolingbroke : a Historical Study, p. 211.) (2) At Paris they have a stated set of paradoxical orations. This anecdote very possibly refers to M. de Pouilly's Dissertation sur V incertitude de VHistoire des qttatres premiers siicles de Rome, which was read at the Academy of Belles Lettres, at Paris, Dec. 15, 1722. It is published in the sixth volume of the Memoirs of the Academy, and answered by Saliier in several memoirs published in the same work in the course of the years 1723, 1724, and 1725. Buckingham. (Page 30.) (l) That satire for writing which Dryden was beat in Rose Alley. This was the Essay upon Satire which Dryden revised. It was written in 1675, but not made public until 1679, when several copies 204 NOTES. were handed about in manuscript. Rochester, upon whom the satire was particularly severe, meditated a base and cowardly revenge ; and upon the night of the i8th December 1679, Dryden was waylaid by hired ruffians, and severely beaten as he passed through Rose Street, Covent Garden, returning from Will's coffee-house to his own house in Gerard Street. Buckingham. (Page 31.) ( I ) Nathaniel Lee was Fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge. Lee was born in 1655. He wrote eleven tragedies, among which are Nero (1675), Sophonisba (1676), The Rival Queens (1677), Mithri- dates (1678), Theodosius (1680), and the Massacre of Paris (1690). He spent four years in Bedlam, and died in 1692, (2) And died between two common girls at a little alehouse in Yorkshire. Pope describes the scene in one of his satires — " In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung. The floors of plaister, and the waDs of dung, On once a flock -bed, but repair'd with straw. With tape-ty'd curtains never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red. Great Villiers lies — alas ! how changed from him, That life of pleasure and that soul of whim ! Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove. The bow'r of wanton Shrewsbury and love ; Or just as gay, at Council, in a ring Of mimic'd Statesmen, and their merry King. No Wit to flatter left of all his store ! No Fool to laugh at, which he valu'd more. There Victor of his health, of fortune, friends. And fame, tliis lord of useless thousands ends." — Moral Essays, Epistle III., verses 299-314. NOTES. 205 CiBBER. (Page 34.) (l) The story invented by Cibber was an absolute lie. ' The story referred to will be found by the curious at page 47 of A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, inquiring into the motives that might induce him in his satyrical works to be so frequently fond of Air. Cibber s name (1742). It is not of a character to be repeated here. The Lord W. mentioned was Addison's stepson, Lord Warwick. Cowley. (Page 36.) (l) He was much in love with his Leonora. In The Chronicle Cowley enumerates all the mistresses who have held brief sway over his affections, concluding the poem as follows — " But I will briefer with tliem be, Since few of them were long with me. An higher and a nobler strain My present empress does attain. Heleonora, first o' th' name, Whom God grant long to reign ! " (2) He died at Chertsey, etc. This story of Cowley's fatal illness must be compared with that of Sprat, in a letter prefixed to an edition of the poet's works in 1668. " In the heat of the last summer " (says Sprat), " by staying too long amongst his labourers in the meadows, he was taken with a violent defluxion, and stoppage in his breast and throat. This he at first neglected, as an ordinary cold, and refused to send for his usual physicians till it was past all remedies ; and so in the end, after a fortnight's sickness, it proved mortal to him." (3) The parish still talk of the drunken Dean. Mr. Stebbing (Some Verdicts of History Reviewed) justly remarks that Pope is in error in assuming the "drunken Dean" to be Dean 2o6 NOTES. Sprat. In a letter to Sprat (21 May 1665: Johnson's Life), Cowley refers to a convivial country neighbour as " the clean." Sprat was not appointed to his deanery until 1683. D'AvENANT. (Page 38.) (i) Sir William himself seemed fond of having it taken for truth. It is difScuIt to determine what truth there may be in the story that D'Avenant was an offspring of Shakespeare; but that "Sir William seemed fond of having it taken for truth " is confirmed by John Aubery in his Letters Written by Eminent Persons. Aubery avers that " Sir William would sometimes, when he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends . . . say that it seemed to him that he writt with the very spirit that Shakespeare [did], and seemed contented enough to be thought his son." It may be added that Mr. Joseph Knight (Diet. Nat. Biog,, xiv. 102) quotes the following stanza of a satire upon D'Avenant as a contemporary allusion to the scandal — " Your wits have further than you rode. You needed not have gone abroad. D'Avenant from Avon comes, Rivers are still the Muse's Rooms. Dort knows our name, no more Durt on't ; An't be but for that D'Avenant." Dryden. (Page 42.) (i) It was LCing Charles the Second who gave Dryden the hitit for writing his poem called "The Medal." This poem is an unsparing attack upon Shaftesbury, and takes its title from the medal struck to commemorate that nobleman's release from the Tower. He had been prosecuted for high treason by the Government in 1681 ; but the Bill had been ignored by the Grand NOTES. 207 Jury in London. His adherents thereupon gleefully struck a medal bearing the head and name of Shaftesbury, and on the reverse a sun, obscured by a cloud, rising over the Tower and City of London, with the date of the refusal of the Bill, and the motto, LiETAMUR. The Oxford speech referred to at the close of this anecdote is that which the king delivered to the Oxford Parliament in March 168 1, in which (while refusing entirely to assent to a Bill for excluding the Duke of York from the succession) he proposed that the Government should be carried on after his death in James's name by the Prince of Orange as Regent for James. (2) / ttsed now and then to thrust fnyself into Wiirs. Will's coSee-house, which had been known successively as the Red Cow and the Rose, before it took its permanent name from William Urwin, the proprietor, was the corner house on the north side of Russell Street, at the end of Bow Street, now No. 21. Here Dryden had his arm-chair, which in winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire, and in summer was placed in the balcony. His was the seat of judgment, and appeal was made to him in all literary dis- putes. He seems to have been held in great veneration ; and we are told that the young beaux and wits, who seldom approached the principal table, thought it a great honour to have a pinch out of his snuff-box. (3) Dryden had three or four sons, etc. He had three sons — Charles, John, and Erasmus Henry. Charles and John held offices in the Pope's household ; and Erasmus Henry, who appears to have been intended for the priesthood, was (as Pope states) a captain in the Pope's guards. (4) He was as plump as Mr. Pitt. The " Mr. Pitt " here referred to is of course the Rev. Christopher Pitt, Spence's friend. 2o8 NOTES. CoNGREVE AND Farquhar. (Page 48.) (i) Congreve was very iniirnate for years with Mrs. Bracegirdle. Anne Bracegirdle (1663?- 174 8) acted with great success in all Congreve's plays — as Araminta in the Old Bachelor (1693), ^^ Cynthia in the Double Dealer (1693), as Angelica in Love for Love (1695), as Almeria in the Moitrjilng Bride (1697), and as Millamant in the Way of the World (1700). She quitted the stage as a profession in 1707, but appeared once more in the part of Angelica {Love for Love") at Betterton's benefit in 1709. She was in her own time suspected of being married to Congreve. « (2) The young Duchess of Marlborough. This was Henrietta, daughter of the great Duke of Marlborough, who inherited his title and the greater part of his immense property. She was the wife of the Earl of Godolphin. Her friendship for Congreve was of an eccentric character, and she mourned his loss in a most extraordinary way. " She had a figure made (according to one account an ivory automaton, according to others a waxen statue), life- size, and exactly like him, which sat in Congreve's clothes at her table, and was so contrived as to nod mechanically when she spoke to it. Her ennui went to such lengths that she had the feet of this figure wrapped in cloths as poor Congreve's gouty feet had been, while a physician attended on the statue and pretended to diagnose its daily condition." {Gosst, Life of Congreve, ^. 172.) (3) Mr. Pope always used to call Farquhar a farce-w) iter. Pope expresses this opinion of F. in one of his satires — " What pert, low Dialogue has Farquhar ^VTit ! How Van wants grace, who never wanted wit ! " — Imitations of Horace, Book I., Epistle 2, verses 288-9. NOTES. 209 Fenton and Broome. (Pnye 51.) (i) Fenton had two hundred and forty pounds of hhn, and Broome six hundred. According to Warburton, Fenton received three hundred pounds. Broome really received no more than five hundred — four hundred for the translation of the eight books and one hundred for the notes. [Cwnxvm^ia.msjohnsoii's Lives, iii. 211.) Kneller. (Page 59.) (1) I was once -Milling to try how far his vanity -vouUi cany him. Sir Godfrey's vanity appears to have been a source of continual amusement to the Pope circle. Once, however, he turned the laugh against the poet. Pope in banter said that if Sir Godfrey had been consulted in the creation of the world it would have been made more perfect than it is ; upon which the painter, looking at the diminutive person of his friend, said, " There are some little things in it I think I could have mended." (2) I paid Sir Godfrey Kneller a visit hut two days before he died. It was upon this occasion that the following conversation is said to have occurred. The authority for it is the younger Richardson {Richardsoniaiia ; or, Occasional Reflections on the Moral Nature of Man, 1776). Mr. Pope was sitting by Sir Godfrey's bedside, and, seeing him so impatient at the thoughts of going, had told him he had been a very good man, and no doubt would go to a better place. " Ah, my good friend, Mr. Pope," said he, " I wish God would let me stay at Whitton." (3) A7id desired me to write an epitaph for it. Kneller was buried at Twickenham, and the " memorial," a monument by Rysbrack, was erected at Westminster Abbey. Pope's epitaph is as follows — 724 2IO NOTES. " Kneller, by Heav'n, and not a Master, taught, Whose Alt was Nature, and whose Pictures Thought • Now for two ages having snatch'd from fate Whate'er was beauteous, or whate'er was great. Lies crown'd with Princes' honours, Poets' lays, Due to his Merit, and brave Tliirst of praise. Li%ing, great Nature fear'd he might outvie Her works ; and dying, fears herself may die." Lady Mary Wortley Montague. (Page 63.) (i) Lady M. W. M. at Rome. Spence did not become acquainted with Lady Mary until towards the end of 1740, when he was making his last Continental tour in the company of Lord Lincoln, In a letter written at the time he says — "I always desired to be acquainted with Lady Mary, and could never bring it about, though we were so often together in London. Soon after we came to this place her ladyship came here, and in five days I was well acquainted with her. She is one of the most shining characters in the world, but shines like a comet ; she is all irregularity, and always wandering ; the most wise, the most imprudent ; loveliest, most disagreeable ; best natured, cruellest woman in the world; 'all things by turns and nothing long.' She was married young, and she told me, with that freedom much travelling gives, that she was never in so great a hurry of thought as the month before she was married : she scarce slept any one night that month. You know she was one of the most celebrated beauties of her day, and had a vast number of offers, and the thing that kept her awake was who to fix upon. She was determined as to two points from the first — that is, to be married" to somebody, and not to be married to the man her father advised her to have. The last night of the month she determined, and in the morning left the husband of her father's choice buying the wedding-ring, and scuttled away to be married to Mr. Wortley." NOTES. 211 (2) / have got fifty or sixty of Mr. Pope's letters by nie. These letters were published by Dr. Warton, and in Dallaway's edition of Lady Mary's Works. They may be seen in most editions of Pope. (3) To ask Mr. Pope why he had left off visiting me. Several reasons have been put forward to account for Pope's quarrel with Lady Mary Wortley Montague. The late Mr. Charles Went- worth Dilke — as well-informed and keen a critic as any who have discussed the subject — is inclined to adopt the story told by a Miss Hawkins — namely, that the quarrel " originated in the return of a borrowed pair of sheets unwashed," (Papers of a Critic, i. 352.) Mr. Moy Thomas thinks the quarrel was more political than any- thing else ; the Montagues being influential Whigs, while Pope was a Papist and a Tory. The most reasonable explanation, however, is that adopted by Mr. W. J. Courthope {Life of Pope, p. 141) — namely, that Pope, whose letters to Lady Mary are over-brimming with gallantry, probably ventured upon a declaration, and was laughed at for his pains. Where Pope is concerned, wounded vanity will explain almost anything. (4) Montesquieu in his '^^ Persian Letters." The Lettres persaiies of Montesquieu {1689-1755) were published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1721. They were reprinted in London soon afterwards. Newton. (Page 68.) (i) Sir Isaac Nexvfons house at Colds-tvorth is a handsome slrticture. " Newton was born in the Manor-house of Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in the parish of Colsterworth, in the County of Lincoln, close to the village of Colsterworth, and about six miles south of Grantham. . . . The Manor-house is situated in a pleasant little hollow on the west 212 NOTES. side of the vnlley of the river Witham, which rises near it, and one spring of which is in the Manor." (Brewster's Life of Sir Isaac Newton, i. 4.) Otway. (Page 72.) d) He drank water when violently heated. Dennis's story does not agree with the more picturesque and popular account of Otway's death. He is generally supposed to have died of want ; or, as is related by one of his biographers, by swallowing a piece of bread which charity had supplied. He went out almost naked in the rage of hunger, and finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffee- house, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea ; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choked with the first mouthful. Peterborough. (Page 73.) (i) / would willingly live to give that rascal (Burnet) the lie in half his history. Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, the author of the History of tny own Times from the Restoration to the Peace of Utrecht, died in 1 7 1 5. The first volume of the History appeared in 1724; the second ten years later. Philips. (Page 76.) (i) The Critique on the " Pastorals" was written by Mr. Pope himself. This notable "Critique" was published in the Gua^-dian, No. 40 (April 27, 1713). Previous to that some essays on pastoral poetry had appeared, in which Philips' mediocrities were highly commended, while Philips himself was extolled as the direct descendant of Theo- critus, Virgil, and Spenser. Pope, who had also written pastorals, was not mentioned. His mortification suggested a most ingenious revenge. He wrote a paper professing to be a continuation of the discourses on pastoral poetry which had already appeared in the NOTES. 213 Guardian, in which he instituted a comparison between Philips and himself, ironically commending the performances of the former and depreciating his own. So subtle was the irony that Steele, to whom the paper was sent for insertion, thought it a direct attack upon Pope, and asked him if he objected to its being printed. Pope had no objection; and to the chagrin of Philips and the amusement of Addison, the critique appeared. Philips, unable to wield the pen with the skill required to meet his antagonist successfully on paper, hung up a rod at Button's, and threatened to chastise Pope should he dare to make his appearance there. Pope carried on the war by inducing his friend Gay to burlesque Philips' Pastorals^ which he did in the Shepherd's Week (1714). Pope never forgot this quarrel with Philips, who has a commemorative line in the Dwiciad — " Lo ! Ambrose Philips is preferred for wit." Prior. (Page 78.) (i) What a simple thing was it to say upon his tombstone that he was writing a history of his oivn times ! Prior left ;^SOo for a monument in Westminster Abbey, the epitaph upon which commences as follows — " Sui Temporis Historian! medi- tanti, Paulatim obrepens Febris Operi simul et Vitce filum abrupit." (2) Fiior left most of his effects to , . . ChloL By his will Prior ordered that the sum of ;^iooo should be set aside for the purchase of an annuity for Elizabeth Cox, and she and his servant, Adrian Drift, were made residuary legatees. But it may be doubted whether this Elizabeth Cox was Prior's Chloe. Dr. Arbulhnot, writing to a Mr. Watkins (September 30, 1721), says—" Prior has had a narrow escape by dying, for if he had lived he had married a brimstone bitch, one Bessy Cox, that keeps an alehouse in Long Acre. Her husband died about a month ago, and Prior has left his estate between his servant Jonathan [«.