in great good humor, his intention so to continue. In the ensuing quarrel Cibber kept his temper irritatingly well; and Pope indeed pretended to take the offense lightly. When the two Richardsons one day visited him, they found him reading one of Cibber's pamphlets. "These things are my diversion," he said; but as he read, they perceived his features "writhing with anguish." And when they left, the younger Richardson told his father that he prayed he might be spared such diversions as he had that day seen Pope enjoy.

The Dunciad brought forth a long succession of attacks and bitter pamphlets. Pope usually dodged the issue or protected himself behind the portly person of Warburton. The general effect of the book, however, was a wholesome rebuke to the crowd of scribblers. Most men have long forgotten the names of Pope's victims, and nearly all have ceased to read the coarse and abusive language that makes the poem at once a terrible and a revolting invective; but in the final lines the genuine declaration of war against dullness and deceit, in a satirical apostrophe to Chaos - Pope reaches a height nowhere else attained by him:

"Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored,
Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all."

When Dr. Johnson was told that Pope himself so much admired these lines that his voice failed him in repeating them, he replied, " And well it might, sir, for they are noble lines."

Pope lived only about a year after the final form of the Dunciad appeared. It seems as if the last years of a man who had gained such universal distinction might

have been spent more nobly than in bickering with venal publishers. But Pope had become inextricably entangled in his petty subterfuges; his only way out, he thought, was to cover his tracks by new deceits. It was in the years between 1730 and 1740, while the Essay on Man and the Dunciad were maturing, while he was amusing himself with the Epistles and Satires, that Pope undertook to publish his correspondence. In it he appears in a very favorable light, and for some time critics believed it to be an honest biography; but it is now generally known that Pope not only falsified by omission, but, far worse, by addition. The better to cover his tracks, he induced one Curll, a piratical bookseller, to steal the altered correspondence with Wycherley from the library of Lord Oxford, where it had been conspicuously placed. Then, however, Pope grew uneasy until he could secure all outstanding correspondence which might incriminate him. Curll became suspicious, and published certain letters without Pope's authority, as well as notes which Pope could not deny. A scheme to publish most of the real correspondence, a step which would have proclaimed Curll a humbug, was then hit upon by Pope. To do this he descended even to deceiving his old friend Swift, who was now sinking into mental feebleness. Altogether, Pope made a bad business of the whole affair, and at the same time acquired, in the eyes of posterity, the name of an habitual swindler.

In strange contrast to his wrangling with Curll, Pope's last hours were comfortable and happy. As his friends gathered about his bedside, his truer, gentler nature rose; he forgot all the petty animosities of his life. Once he cried, "What's that?" pointing to the

air, and then with a gentle smile added, "'T was a vision." Bolingbroke said touchingly, "I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's love than" and his voice broke down. In his last days Pope always had a kind word for his friends; in Spence's comment, " as if his humanity had outlasted his understanding." And it is pleasant to think that the man who was never known in his life to laugh smiled cheerfully on his deathbed. He died quietly on May 30, 1744.

In a concluding estimate of Pope one is confronted by the conflicting elements that made up his whole life. For at the same time that one feels contempt for his littlenesses, his deceit, his silly vanities, one's admiration is excited by his occasional genuineness, one's respect by the consecration of his life, in spite of almost overwhelming obstacles, to a literary ideal, and one's sympathy by the tender-hearted affection which, after all, was the deepest quality in his character. His love and hate, like his little crooked body, were frail, spasmodic. Where Addison had been displeased, and Swift completely, crushingly angry, Pope would have been only peevish. And his love—a passing mood - lacked, by the same comparison, the serenity of Addison's and the consuming fire of Swift's. Yet for all this, Pope's is a permanent personality; in no other man is the truest and most characteristic worth of the Augustan Age so completely revealed.

One must not fail, furthermore, always to think of Pope as a writer. No less a man than Dr. Johnson told Boswell that "a thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope." But, more than

his technical skill, Pope did a lasting service to literature as an art. "The master passion in his breast," concludes A. W. Ward, in his preface to the Cambridge edition of Pope, "was not his vanity; it was his veneration for what is great and noble in intellectual life, and his loathing for what is small and mean and noxious. He could not exterminate Grub Street; but as long as he lived and battled against it, it felt that it was only Grub Street, and the world around was conscious of the fact. He served literature neither for power, like Swift; nor, like nearly all his contemporaries, for place and pay; not even for fame chiefly, but for her own sake."

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784

No critic has been more alive to the importance of biography than Samuel Johnson; his Lives of the Poets show him at his best, and he always took pains to collect from competent authority details about the personality of the author with whom he was dealing. In return, Fate has given Johnson himself the best biography that ever was written. Moreover, this same biography has furnished the material and the inspiration for a life of Johnson which is unrivaled in its vivid descriptions of the man and of his times. Every schoolboy reads Macaulay and should look forward to the reading of Boswell.

Samuel Johnson as a representative man of letters is a supremely good example of character outlasting performance. Even more than in Macaulay's day his actual work as a writer has fallen into neglect. His dictionary has long been out of date; the moral essays of the Rambler, once so widely read and imitated, are unknown even to the most general reader. A few of his Lives of the Poets have been edited and praised, but they would probably not have been edited or praised save for a desire to rescue at least something of the great man's work from oblivion, and vindicate his place in the world of letters. The modern editor of Shakespeare sneers at Johnson's notes, and suppresses, often with injustice, Johnson's comments on character and plot. Even Rasselas, a piece of allegorical fiction once thought supremely good, is unread. But his personality,