upon his infirmities as a child of earth, and his consolations as a child of heavenly hopes.

Bentley's life, through forty years (that is, through the entire period of his mature manhood), had been one unrelenting combat with malignant enemies. And yet this singular result had followed, that his enemies reaped the full harvest of mortification and wrath which such a rancorous feud was fitted to produce, whilst he through all this period had enjoyed a sunshine of perpetual peace. The storm had raved through forty years-tormenting the very air up to the barriers of Bentley's doors and windows; but it had never been suffered to gain an entrance, or to violate the sanctity of his happy fireside; even as the life-destroying vapours in coal-mines suffer an arrest at the very moment when they reach the meshes of the safety-lamp. One golden sanctuary did Bentley enjoy, and that was his own hearth; one unfailing comforter, and that was his own wife.

Her at length he lost. From her, after a union of forty years, during which her confidential advice, but still more her faithful sympathy, had cheered and sustained him, often through great difficulties, but at some periods through great dangers, at last the grave parted him. And the opinion of all men was that now beyond a doubt he would drift away into hopeless gloom. But, just as his last anchor was unsettling, and beginning to drive before this great billowy anguish, suddenly a new morning of consolation ascended for him a resurrection of pathetic hopes. His married daughter came to Trinity Lodge, and by her pious attentions first of all recalled him from wandering thoughts and unprofitable fretting. Next, she drew him at intervals within the circle of her children; led him to take an interest in their joyous sports; and filled his halls with the music of infant laughter, which for seventy years had been a sound unknown to him. An Indian summer crept stealthily over his closing days; a summer less gaudy than the mighty summer of the solstice, but sweet, golden, silent; happy, though sad; and to Bentley, upon whom (now eighty years old) his last fatal illness rushed as suddenly as it moved rapidly through all its stages, it was never known that this

sweet mimicry of summer—a spiritual or fairy echo of a mighty music that has departed—is as frail and transitory as it is solemn, quiet, and lovely.1

1 The Indian summer of Canada, and I believe universally of the Northern United States, is in November; at which season in some climates a brief echo of summer uniformly occurs. It is a mistake to suppose it unknown in Europe. Throughout Germany (I believe also Russia) it is popularly known, sometimes as The Old Woman's Summer, sometimes as The Girl's Summer. A natural question arises -what lurking suggestion it is of dim ideas or evanescent images that confers upon the Indian summer its peculiar interest. Already in its German and Livonian names we may read an indication that by its primary feature this anomalous season came forward as a feminine reflection of a power in itself by fervour and creative energy essentially masculine; a lunar image of an agency that, by its rapture and headlong life, was imperishably solar. Secondly, it was regarded as a dependency, as a season that looked back to something that had departed, a faint memorial (like the light of setting suns) recalling an archetype of splendours that were hurrying to oblivion. Thirdly, it was itself attached by its place in the succession of annual phenomena to the departing year. By a triple title, therefore, the Indian summer was beautiful, and was sad. For august grandeur, self-sustained, it substituted a frailty of loveliness; and, for the riot and torrent rapture of joy in the fulness of possession, exchanged the moonlight hauntings of a visionary and saddened remembrance. In short, what the American Indian race itself at this time is, that the Indian summer represents symbolically-viz. the most perfect amongst human revelations of grace in form and movement, but under a visible fatality of decay.2

2 Many writers, but above all others Mrs. Jameson (an exquisite observer), have noticed the incomparable grace in bodily conformation, in motion, and in attitude, of the American Indian race. And many more writers have made us acquainted with its numerical declension. From forty millions it has sunk in two centuries to six; and in two centuries more an Indian will be exhibited as a show.3

3 It has been thought unnecessary, in the case of this biography of Bentley, to intersperse any editorial notes with the already numerous notes of De Quincey himself,-partly because effective annotation would have had to be endless in the case of a paper so bristling with names and learned allusions, and partly because notes of the ordinary sort seemed useless for likely or competent readers of such a peculiar paper. For those whom the subject may interest (and De Quincey was the first to invest it with a strong popular interest) Professor Jebb's later biography of Bentley, published in 1882 as one of the volumes of Messrs. Macmillan's English Men of Letters series, will serve as an admirably instructive sequel, and, in some points, a corrective.-M.

ALEXANDER POPE1

ALEXANDER POPE, the most brilliant of all wits who have at any period applied themselves to the poetic treatment of human manners, to the selecting from the play of human character what is picturesque, or the arresting what is fugitive, was born in the city of London on the 21st 2 day of May in the memorable year 1688; about six months, therefore, before the landing of the Prince of Orange and the opening of that great revolution which gave the final ratification to all previous revolutions of that tempestuous century. By the "city" of London the reader is to understand us as speaking with technical accuracy of that district which lies within the ancient walls and the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor. The parents of Pope, there is good reason to think, were of "gentle blood"; which is the expression of the poet himself when describing them in verse. His mother was so undoubtedly; and her illustrious son, in speaking of her to Lord Hervey at a time when any exaggeration was open to an easy refutation, and writing in a spirit most likely to provoke it, does not scruple to say, with a tone of dignified haughtiness not unbecoming the situation of a filial champion on behalf of an insulted mother, that by

1 Contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.-M.

2 Dr. Johnson, however, and Joseph Warton, for reasons not stated, have placed his birth on the 22d. [See appended note at the end of this paper.]

birth and descent she was not below that young lady (one of the two beautiful Miss Lepels) whom his lordship had selected from all the choir of court beauties as the future mother of his children. Of Pope's extraction and immediate lineage for a space of two generations we know enough; beyond that we know little of this little

part is dubious; and what we are disposed to receive as not dubious rests chiefly on his own authority. In the prologue to his Satires, having occasion to notice the lampooners of the times, who had represented his father as "a mechanic, a hatter, a farmer, nay, a bankrupt," he feels himself called upon to state the truth about his parents; and naturally much more so at a time when the low scurrilities of these obscure libellers had been adopted, accredited, and diffused by persons so distinguished in all points of personal accomplishment and rank as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey: "Hard as thy heart," was one of the lines in their joint pasquinade, "Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure." Accordingly he makes the following formal statement :- "Mr. Pope's father was of a gentleman's family in "Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe. "His mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esq., of "York; she had three brothers, one of whom was killed; "another died in the service of King Charles [meaning "Charles I.]; the eldest, following his fortunes, and becom

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ing a general officer in Spain, left her what estate remained "after the sequestrations and forfeitures of her family." The sequestrations here spoken of were those inflicted by the commissioners for the Parliament; and usually they levied a fifth, or even two-fifths, according to the apparent delinquency of the parties. But in such cases two great differences arose in the treatment of the royalists: first, that the report was coloured according to the interest which a man possessed, or other private means for biassing the commissioners; secondly, that often, when money could not be raised on mortgage to meet the sequestration, it became necessary to sell a family estate suddenly, and therefore in those times at great loss; so that a nominal fifth might be depressed by favour to a tenth, or raised by the necessity of selling to a half. And hence might arise the small dowry of Mrs. Pope,

notwithstanding the family estate in Yorkshire had centred in her person. But, by the way, we see from the fact of the eldest brother having sought service in Spain that Mrs. Pope was a Papist; not, like her husband, by conversion, but by hereditary faith. This account, as publicly thrown out in the way of challenge by Pope, was, however, sneered at by a certain Mr. Pottinger of those days; who, together with his absurd name, has been safely transmitted to posterity in connexion with this single feat of having contradicted Alexander Pope. We read, in a diary published by the Microcosm, "Met a large hat with a man under it.” And so, here, we cannot so properly say that Mr. Pottinger brings down the contradiction to our times as that the contradiction brings down Mr. Pottinger. "Cousin Pope," said Pottinger, "had made himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered where he got it"; and he then goes on to plead, in abatement of Pope's pretensions, "that an old maiden aunt, equally related " (that is, standing in the same relation to himself and to the poet), "a great genealogist, who was always talking of her family, never mentioned this circumstance." And again we are told, from another quarter, that the Earl of Guildford, after express investigation of this matter, was sure that," amongst the descendants of the Earls of Downe, "there was none of the name of Pope." How it was that Lord Guildford came to have any connexion with the affair is not stated by the biographers of Pope; but we have ascertained that, by marriage with a female descendant from the Earls of Downe, he had come into possession of their English estates.

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Finally, though it is rather for the honour of the Earls of Downe than of Pope to make out the connexion, we must observe that Lord Guildford's testimony, if ever given at all, is simply negative; he had found no proofs of the connexion, but he had not found any proofs to destroy it; whilst, on the other hand, it ought to be mentioned, though unaccountably overlooked by all previous biographers, that one of Pope's anonymous enemies, who hated him personally, but was apparently master of his family history, and too honourable to belie his own convictions, expressly affirms, of his own authority, and without reference to any claim put forward