before he begins his terrible arraignment.1 And though Pope by no means draws the whole of Addison, what he does draw is near enough to hit home. Did not the great man "just hint a fault and hesitate dislike"? Was this not his power? Was he not perhaps sometimes "so obliging that he ne'er obliged "? "I sent the verses to Mr. Addison," says Pope,2" and he used me very civilly ever after." Thackeray adds: "No wonder he did. It was shame very likely more than fear that silenced him. . . . His great figure looks out on us from the past - stainless but for that -pale, calm, and beautiful; it bleeds from that black wound."

The quarrel with Steele, in no way so serious or protracted as that with Pope, is of importance chiefly because Addison and Dick Steele had been friends since Charter House days. But once manhood was reached, there was very little except the pen in common between them. Addison developed by easy degrees into political prominence and dignity; Steele, impetuous, rushing from one pursuit to another, found himself at forty in no political prominence except a kind of notoriety that attached to rabid Whiggism. Addison was too judicial in his nature for Steele; Steele was too injudicious for Addison. It was hardly remarkable, then, that two things should have precipitated the quarrel between men who were drawing thus naturally apart. Addison had frequently lent Steele money, and had been, felt Sir Richard, who took little thought for the morrow, just a suggestion cold-blooded and severe in exacting payment. In the second place, Addison raised

1 See an admirable essay by Mr. G. K. Chesterton on "Pope and the Art of Satire," in Varied Types.

2 The verses were not published till 1723.

Tickell, a young man of thirty, to the position of Under Secretary of State, while Steele, the friend of his boyhood, the editor of the Tatler and Spectator, and a Member of Parliament, was left in the cold. When the famous bill for limiting the number of peers was brought in, therefore, it was not unnatural that Steele should defend the Opposition against Addison and the Ministers. Steele's weapon was a paper called the Plebeian; Addison replied in the Old Whig. Macaulay has pointed out that Steele, however he blundered upon the truth, was illogical in his arguments, and that Addison, however unsound his premises, by logical argument and superior style easily defeated the Plebeian. There is no evidence that the friends of a lifetime, who thus quarreled almost at the grave, were ever reconciled.

In 1716 Addison, after a long courtship, married the Countess Dowager of Warwick. His married life, which lasted only three years, does not seem to have been particularly happy. Perhaps the most significant feature of the union was Addison's removal to the Countess' home, Holland House, "a house," says Macaulay, "which can boast of a greater number of inmates distinguished in political and literary history than any other private dwelling in England."

Soon after moving to Holland House, Addison was forced by recurring attacks of asthma to abandon his work, political and literary. He declined quietly from now on, and, with many unaccomplished literary projects before him, died, as serenely as he had lived, on June 17, 1719. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Addison's last hours were characteristic of his whole life. It is said that just before he died he sent to ask

Gay's pardon for some offense of which Gay knew not. We regret that Pope and Steele could not also have been summoned to that bedside, not only to receive his forgiveness, but also to hear his last remark to his dissolute stepson, the Earl of Warwick, "See how a Christian can die." Pope would probably have gone off and written a satire on the words; and one does feel that Addison was exasperatingly sure of himself even in death: his unbroken successes, even his immortality, came as easily to him as eating his dinner. At bottom, however, he was a great and good man; his faults grow very little in the light of his learning, his refinement, his sanity, his genuineness, and his generosity. He was above party strife. He was the ablest prose writer of his time; he stands, in fact, preeminent with two or three others in the whole history of English literature. Among the intellects of the day he had only one peer - Swift. Above all, he "reconciled wit and virtue," one of the most important contributions to morality in the eighteenth century.

ALEXANDER POPE

POPE held a unique position in the age of Queen Anne. Most of the great writers at that time depended for their eminence as much on the favor of Church or State as on their literary merits. Addison, for instance, was Secretary for Ireland and later Secretary of State; Swift was as much the Dean of St. Patrick's as the author of Gulliver; Steele was a member of Parliament, Prior was an ambassador, and Gay depended on a patron. Much of this favor, it is true, was the reward of literary excellence; the success and the preferment, however, went hand-in-hand. Pope, on the other hand, in the face of physical deformities and religious ostracism, fought his way purely by his pen to the first place among contemporary poets. He perfected the heroic couplet, and he gave serious dignity to letters as a calling. So great was he, in fact, that poets unquestioningly made him their model for a half century; his influence extended into the very heart of the reaction against him and his school. His life will be found interesting as it touches the lives of his great contemporaries, as it develops a character that was a strange mixture of petty vanities and high purpose, of bitter jealousy and genuine tenderheartedness; but it must be chiefly kept in mind that Pope was, from the age of twelve to his grave, peculiarly, professionally a man of letters.

Alexander Pope was born of Roman Catholic parents on May 21, 1688, in Lombard Street, London. His father, of the same Christian name, acquired as a linen

merchant a fortune sufficiently great to enable him to retire, when Pope was still a small child, to Binfield, on the border of Windsor Forest. His mother, whose maiden name was Edith Turner, of good Yorkshire stock, lived to the great age of ninety-three. The lasting affection of the son for his mother is a refreshing contrast to the quarrels and petty deceits that checkered his whole life.

Two things withheld from Pope the education common to English boys. The "glorious Revolution" of 1688, in the first place, brought Catholics into disfavor, frequently into persecution. Besides this, Pope was deformed. It was only by patient nursing and constant attendance throughout his life that soul and bodyhis "crazy carcase," as Wycherley called it were kept together. He did attend three schools, between the ages of eight and twelve, but most of his schooling came through the help of a family priest and his own eagerness to learn. He himself told Spence that he had taught himself "Latin, as well as French and Greek." The result was a very defective scholarship, but a useful familiarity with Homer, Virgil, Statius, Horace, and Ovid.

Pope has been considered, largely on his own suspicious testimony, one of the great examples of poetic precocity. On his own authority he versified almost from the cradle. Adopting the phrase from Ovid, he said:

"As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisp'd in uumbers, for the numbers came." He submitted his verses for correction to his father, who, when not satisfied, returned them with the comment, "These are not good rhymes." But the young