POPE.

privately said, to mean the Duke of Chandos; a man perhaps too much delighted with pomp and show, but of a temper kind and beneficent, and who had consequently the voice of the public in his favour.

A violent outcry was therefore raised against the ingratitude and treachery of Pope, who was said to have been indebted to the patronage of Chandos for a present of a thousand pounds, and who gained the opportunity of insulting him by the kindness of his invitation.

The receipt of the thousand pounds Pope publicly denied; but from the reproach which the attack on a character so amiable brought upon him, he tried all means of escaping. The name of Cleland was again employed in an apology, by which no man was satisfied; and he was at last reduced to shelter his temerity behind dissimulation, and endeavour to make that be disbelieved which he never had confidence openly to deny. He wrote an exculpatory letter to the duke, which was answered with great magnanimity, as by a man who accepted his excuse without believing his professions. He said that to have ridiculed his taste, or his buildings, had been an indifferent action in another man; but that in Pope, after the reciprocal kindness that had been exchanged between them, it had been less easily excused.

239

letters between him and many of his friends,
which, falling into the hands of Curll, a rapa-
cious bookseller of no good fame, were by him
printed and sold. This volume containing some
letters from noblemen, Pope incited a prosecu-
tion against him in the House of Lords for breach
of privilege, and attended himself to stimulate
the resentment of his friends. Curll appeared
at the bar, and, knowing himself in no great
danger, spoke of Pope with very little reverence:
"He has," said Curll, "a knack at versifying,
but in prose I think myself a match for him."
When the orders of the House were examined,
none of them appeared to be infringed; Curli
went away triumphant, and Pope was left to
seek some other remedy.

Curll's account was, that one evening a man
in a clergyman's gown, but with a lawyer's
band, brought and offered to sale a number of
printed volumes, which he found to be Pope's
epistolary correspondence; that he asked no
name, and was told none, but gave the price
demanded, and thought himself authorized to
use his purchase to his own advantage.

That Curll gave a true account of the transaction it is reasonable to believe, because no falsehood was ever detected; and when, some years afterwards, I mentioned it to Lintot, the son of Bernard, he declared his opinion to be, that Pope Pope, in one of his letters, complaining of the knew better than any body else how Curll obtreatment which his poem had found, "ownstained the copies, because another was at the that such critics can intimidate him, nay almost same time sent to himself, for which no price had persuade him to write no more, which is a com- ever been demanded, as he made known his reThe man who solution not to pay a porter, and consequently pliment this age deserves." threatens the world is always ridiculous; for not to deal with a nameless agent. Such care had been taken to make them pubthe world can easily go on without him, and in a short time will cease to miss him. I have lic, that they were sent at once to two bookheard of an idiot, who used to revenge his vexa-sellers; to Curll, who was likely to seize them tions by lying all night upon the bridge. "There as prey; and to Lintot, who might be expected is nothing," says Juvenal, "that a man will not to give Pope information of the seeming injury. believe in his own favour." Pope had been flat-Lintot, I believe, did nothing; and Curl did tered till he thought himself one of the moving powers in the system of life. When he talked of laying down his pen, those who sat round him entreated and implored; and self-love did not suffer him to suspect that they went away and laughed.

The following year deprived him of Gay, a man whom he had known early, and whom he seemed to love with more tenderness than any other of his literary friends. Pope was now forty-four years old; an age at which the mind begins less easily to admit new confidence, and the will to grow less flexible; and when, therefore, the departnre of an old friend is very accurately felt.

In the next year he lost his mother, not by an unexpected death, for she lasted to the age of ninety-three; but she did not die unlamented. The filial piety of Pope was in the highest degree amiable and exemplary; his parents had the happiness of living till he was at the summit of poetical reputation, till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has, among its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than

such a son.

One of the passages of Pope's life which seems to deserve some inquiry, was a publication of

what was expected. That to make them pub-
lic was the only purpose may be reasonably sup
posed, because the numbers offered to sale by
the private messengers showed that hope of
gain could not have been the motive of the im-
pression.

It seems that Pope being desirous of printing
his Letters, and not knowing how to do, without
imputation of vanity, what has in this country
been done very rarely, contrived an appearance
of compulsion; that, when he could complain
that his letters were surreptitiously published,
he might decently and defensively publish them
himself.

Pope's private correspondence, thus promul gated, filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship. There were some letters, which a very good or a very wise man would wish suppressed; but, as they had been already exposed, it was im practicable now to retract them.

From the perusal of those Letters, Mr. Allen first conceived the desire of knowing him; and with so much zeal did he cultivate the friendship which he had newly formed, that when Pope told his purpose of vindicating his own property by a genuine edition, he offered to pay

the cost.

This however Pope did not accept; hut in time solicited a subscription for a quarto volume,

1

1

commentator, had been eight years under his consideration, and of which he seems to have desired the success with great solicitude. He had now many open and doubtless many secret enemies. The "Dunces" were yet smarting with the war; and the superiority which he publicly arrogated disposed the world to wish his humi

which appeared, (1737,) I believe, with sufficient
profit. In the preface he tells, that his Letters
were reposited in a friend's library, said to be
the Earl of Oxford's, and that the copy thence
stolen was sent to the press. The story was
doubtless received with different degrees of
credit. It may be suspected that the preface to
the Miscellanies was written to prepare the pub-liation.
lic for such an incident; and to strengthen this
opinion, James Worsdale, a painter, who was
employed in clandestine negotiations, but whose
veracity was very doubtful, declared that he was
the messenger who carried, by Pope's direction,
the books to Curll.

When they were thus published and avowed, as they had relation to recent facts and persons either then living or not yet forgotten, they may be supposed to have found readers; but as the facts were minute, and the characters, being either private or literary, were little known or little regarded, they awakened no popular kindness or resentment: the book never became much the subject of conversation; some read it as a contemporary history, and some perhaps as a model of epistolary language; but those who read it did not talk of it. Not much therefore was added by it to fame or envy; nor do I remember that it produced either public praise or public censure.

It had however, in some degree, the recommendation of novelty; our language had few letters, except those of statesmen. Howel, indeed, about a century ago, published his Letters, which are commended by Morhoff, and which alone, of his hundred volumes, continue his memory. Loveday's Letters were printed only once; those of Herbert and Suckling are hardly known. Mrs. Phillips' [Orinda's] are equally neglected. And those of Walsh seem written as exercises, and were never sent to any living mistress or friend. Pope's epistolary excellence had an open field; he had no English rival living or dead.

Pope is seen in this collection as connected with the other contemporary wits, and certainly suffers no disgrace in the comparison; but it must be remembered, that he had the power of favouring himself; he might have originally had publication in his mind, and have written with care, or have afterwards selected those which he had most happily conceived or most diligently laboured; and I know not whether there does not appear something more studied and artificial in his productions than the rest, except one long letter by Bolingbroke, composed with the skill and industry of a professed author. It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously formed a style rarely writes afterwards with complete ease. Pope may be said to write always with his reputation in his head; Swift, perhaps, like a man who remembered he was writing to Pope; but Arbuthnot, like one who lets thoughts drop from his pen as they rise into his mind.

Before these Letters appeared, he published the first part of what he persuaded himself to think a system of ethics, under the title of "An Essay on Man ;" which, if his letter to Swift (of Sept. 14, 1725) be rightly explained by the

These Letters were evidently prepared for the press by Pope himself. Some of the originals, lately discoVered, will prove this beyond all dispute.-C

All this he knew, and against all this he pro vided. His own name and that of his friend to whom the work is inscribed, were in the first editions carefully suppressed; and the poem being of a new kind, was ascribed to one or another, as favour determined or conjecture wandered; it was given, says Warburton, to every man, except him only who could write it. Those who like only when they like the author, and who are under the dominion of a name, condemned it; and those admired it who are willing to scatter praise at random, which, while it is unappropriated, excites no envy. Those friends of Pope that were trusted with the secret, went about lavishing honours on the newborn poet, and hinting that Pope was never so much in danger from any former rival.

To those authors whom he had personally offended, and to those whose opinion the world considered as decisive, and whom he suspected of envy or malevolence, he sent his essay as a present before publication, that they might defeat their own enmity by praises which they could not afterwards decently retract.

With these precautions, 1733, was published the first part of the "Essay on Man." There had been for some time a report that Pope was busy on a system of morality; but this design was not discovered in the new poem, which had a form and a title with which its readers were unacquainted. Its reception was not uniform; some thought it a very imperfect piece, though not without good lines. When the author was unknown, some, as will always happen, favoured him as an adventurer, and some censured him as an intruder; but all thought him above neglect; the sale increased and editions were multiplied.

The subsequent editions of the first epistle, exhibited two memorable corrections. At first, the poet and his friend

Expatiate freely o'er the scene of man,
A mighty maze of walks without a plan;
for which he wrote afterwards,

A mighty maze, but not without a plan:
for, if there were no plan, it were in vain to
describe or to trace the maze.

The other alteration was of these lines:

And spite of pride, and in thy reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right;

but having afterwards discovered, or been shown,
that the truth," which subsisted "in spite of
reason" could not be very "clear," he substi
tuted

And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite.

To such oversights will the most vigorous mind be liable when it is employed at once upon argument and poetry.

The second and third epistles were published: and Pope was, I believe, more and more sus

241

pected of writing them at last, in 1734, he | full fraught, together with a fancy fertile of
avowed the fourth, and claimed the honour of a
moral poet.

In the conclusion it is sufficiently acknowledged, that the doctrine of the "Essay on Man" was received from Bolingbroke, who is said to have ridiculed Pope, among those who enjoyed his confidence, as having adopted and advanced principles of which he did not perceive the consequence, and as blindly propagating opinions contrary to his own. munications had been consolidated into a scheme That those comregularly drawn, and delivered to Pope, from whom it returned only transformed from prose to verse, has been reported, but can hardly be true. The Essay plainly appears the fabric of a poet; what Bolingbroke supplied could be only the first principles; the order, illustration, and embellishments, must all be Pope's.

original combinations, and at once exerted the But his knowledge was too multifarious to be powers of the scholar, the reasoner, and the wit. always exact, and his pursuits too eager to be always cautious. haughty confidence, which he disdained to conHis abilities gave him a ceal or mollify; and his impatience of opposi tion disposed him to treat his adversaries with such contemptuous superiority as made his against the advocate the wishes of some who readers commonly his enemies, and excited favoured the cause. He seems to have adopted the Roman emperor's determination, oderint dum metuant; he used no allurements of gentle language, but wished to compel rather than persuade.

His style is copious without selection, and that presented themselves; his diction is coarse forcible without neatness; he took the words and impure; and his sentences are unmeasured.

These principles it is not my business to clear from obscurity, dogmatism, or falsehood; but they were not immediately examined; philosophy and poetry have not often the same readers; himself with the notice of inferior wits, and He had, in the early part of his life, pleased and the Essay abounded in splendid amplifica- corresponded with the enemies of Pope. tions and sparkling sentences, which were read letter was produced, when he had perhaps and admired with no great attention to their ulti-himself forgotten it, in which he tells Concanen, A mate purpose; its flowers caught the eye, which "Dryden, I observe, borrows for want of leisure, did not see what the gay foliage concealed, and and Pope for want of genius; Milton out of for a time flourished in the sunshine of universal pride, and Addison out of modesty." And when approbation. So little was any evil tendency Theobald published "Shakspeare," in opposidiscovered, that, as innocence is unsuspicious, tion to Pope, the best notes were supplied by many read it for a manual of piety. Warburton.

Its reputation soon invited a translator. It was first turned into French prose, and afterwards by Resnel into verse. fell into the hands of Crousaz, who first, when Both translations he had the version in prose, wrote a general censure, and afterwards reprinted Resnel's version, with particular reinarks upon every paragraph.

Crousaz was a professor of Switzerland, eminent for his treatise of Logic and his "Examen de Pyrrhonisme;" and, however little known or regarded here, was no mean antagonist. His mind was one of those in which philosophy and piety are happily united. He was accustomed to argument and disquisition, and perhaps was grown too desirous of detecting faults; but his intentions were always right, his opinions were solid, and his religion pure.

was to change his opinion; and Pope was to
But the time was now come when Warburton
much to the exaltation of his rival.
find a defender in him who had contributed so

him every artifice of offence, and therefore it
The arrogance of Warburton excited against
may be supposed that his union with Pope was
to think differently at different times, of poetical
censured as hypocritical inconstancy; but surely
merit, may be easily allowed. Such opinions
are often admitted, and dismissed, without nice
examination.

reason for changing his mind about questions of Who is there that has not found greater importance?

took, without solicitation, to rescue Pope from Warburton, whatever was his motive, underthe talons of Crousaz, by freeing him from the His incessant vigilance for the promotion of lation, and from month to month continued a imputation of favouring fatality, or rejecting revepiety disposed him too look with distrust upon vindication of the "Essay on Man," in the liteall metaphysical systems of theology, and allrary journal of that time, called "The Republic schemes of virtue and happiness purely rational; and therefore it was not long before he was of Letters." persuaded that the positions of Pope, as they terminated for the most part in natural religion, were intended to draw mankind away from revelation, and to represent the whole course of things as a necessary concatenation of indissoluble fatality; and it is undeniable, that in many passages a religious eye may easily discover expressions not very favourable to morals or to liberty.

About this time Warburton began to make his appearance in the first ranks of learning. He was a man of vigorous faculties, a mind fervid and vehement, supplied by incessant and unlimited inquiry, with wonderful extent and variety of knowledge, which yet had not oppressed his imagination nor clouded his perspicacity. To every work ho brought a memory]

31

dency of his own work, was glad that the posi-
Pope, who probably began to doubt the ten-
tions, of which he perceived himself not to know
the full meaning, could by any mode of inter-
pretation be made to mean well. How much
he was pleased with his gratuitous defender, the
following letter evidently shows:

"SIR,

of your letters. It is in the greatest hurry ima
"I have just received from Mr. R. two more
“April 11, 1732.
ginable that I write this; but I cannot help
thanking you in particular for your third letter,
which is so extremely clear, short, and full, that
I think Mr. Crousaz ought never to have another

Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 223.-C.
This letter is in Mr. Malone's Supplement to

answer, and deserved not so good a one. I can only say, you do him too much honour, and me too much right, so odd as the expression seems; for you have made my system as clear as I ought to have done, and could not. It is indeed the same system as mine, but illustrated with a ray of your own, as they say our natural body is the same still when it is glorified. I am sure I like it better than I did before, and so will every man else. I know I meant just what you explain; but I did not explain my own meaning so well as you. You understand me as well as I do myself; but you express me better than I could express myself. Pray accept the sincerest acknowledgments. I cannot but wish these letters were put together in one book, and intend (with your leave) to procure a translation of part at least, or of all of them, into French: but I shall not proceed a step without your consent and opinion," &c.

as obliged to reward, by this exertion of his m terest, for the benefit which he had received from his attendance in a long illness.

It was said, that, when the court was at Rich mond, Queen Caroline had declared her inten tion to visit him. This may have been only a careless effusion, thought on no more: the report of such notice, however, was soon in many mouths; and, if I do not forget or misapprehend Savage's account, Pope, pretending to decline what was not yet offered, left his house for a time, not, I suppose, for any other reason than lest he should be thought to stay at home in expectation of an honour which would not be conferred. He was therefore angry at Swift, who represents him as "refusing the visits of a queen," because he knew that what had never been offered had never been refused.

Besides the general system of morality, sup posed to be contained in the "Essay on Man," By this fond and eager acceptance of an ex-it was his intention to write distinct poems upon culpatory comment, Pope testified that, what- the different duties or conditions of life; one of ever might be the seeming or real import of the which is the Epistle to Lord Bathurst (1733) principles which he had received from Boling-"On the Use of Riches," a piece on which he broke, he had not intentionally attacked religion; declared great labour to have been bestowed.* and Bolingbroke, if he meant to make him, without his own consent, an instrument of mischief, found him now engaged, with his eyes open, on the side of truth.

It is known that Bolingbroke concealed from Pope his real opinions. He once discovered them to Mr. Hooke, who related them again to Pope, and was told by him that he must have mistaken the meaning of what he heard; and Bolingbroke, when Pope's easiness incited him to desire an explanatio, declared that Hooke had misunderstood h..

Bolingbroke hated Warburton, who had drawn his pupil from him; and a little before Pope's death, they had a dispute, from which they parted with mutual aversion.

From this time Pope lived in the closest intimacy with his commentator, and amply rewarded his kindness and his zeal; for he introduced him to Mr. Murray, by whose interest he became preacher at Lincoln's-Inn; and to Mr. Allen, who gave him his niece and his estate, and by consequence a bishopric. When he died, he left him the property of his works; a legacy which may be reasonably estimated at four thousand pounds.

Into this poem some hints are historically thrown, and some known characters are introduced, with others of which it is difficult to say how far they are real or fictitious; but the praise of Kyrl, the Man of Ross, deserves particular examination, who, after a long and pompous enumeration of his public works and private charities, is said to have diffused all those blessings from five hundred a-year. Wonders are willingly told and willingly heard. The truth is, that Kyrl was a man of known integrity and active benevolence, by whose solicitation the wealthy were persuaded to pay contributions to his charitable schemes; this influence he ob tained by an example of liberality exerted to the utmost extent of his power, and was thus enabled to give more than he had. This account Mr. Victor received from the minister of the place; and I have preserved it, that the praise of a good man, being made more credible, may be more solid. Narrations of romantic and impracticable virtue will be read with wonder, but that which is unattainable is recommended in vain; that good may be endeavoured, it must be shown to be possible.

This is the only piece in which the author has Pope's fondness for the "Essay on Man" ap- given a hint of his religion, by ridiculing the cepeared by his desire of its propagation. Dob-remony of burning the pope; and by mentionson, who had gained reputation by his version of ing with some indignation the inscription on the Prior's "Solomon," was employed by him to Monument. translate it into Latin verse, and was for that purpose some time at Twickenham; but he left his work, whatever was the reason, unfinished, and, by Benson's invitation, undertook the longer task of "Paradise Lost." Pe then desired his friend to find a scholar who should turn his Essay into Latin prose; but no such performance has ever appeared.

When this poem was first published, the dia logue, having no letters of direction, was per plexed and obscure. Pope seems to have writ ten with no very distinct idea; for he calls that an "Epistle to Bathurst," in which Bathurst is introduced as speaking.

He afterwards (1734) inscribed to Lord Cobham his "Characters of Men," written with Pope lived at this time among the great, with close attention to the operations of the mind that reception and respect to which his works and modifications of life. In this poem he has entitled him, and which he had not impaired by endeavoured to establish and exemplify his fa any private misconduct or factious partiality.vourite theory of the ruling passion, by which Though Bolingbroke was his friend, Walpole he means an original direction of desire to some was not his enemy; but treated him with so particular object; an innate affection, which much consideration, as, at his request, to solicit gives all action a determinate and invariable tenand obtain from the French minister an abbey for Mr. Southcot, whom he considered himself

• Spence

dency, and operates upon the whole system of suppressed. Of these pieces it is useless to setlife, either openly, or more secretly by the in- tle the dates, as they had seldom much relation tervention of some accidental or subordinate pro-to the times, and perhaps had been long in his pension.