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No figure in literature, not even Dr. Johnson, is better known to us than the one-sided spider-armed dwarf, who for nearly a century ruled over the Anglo-Saxon mind. He was so weak as to be unable to dress himself without help, and he could scarcely stand upright till he was laced into an armor made of stiff canvas. His features wore an expression of habitual pain brightened up by a penetrating eye. His personal habits had the eccentricities of poet and invalid. His servant was called up four times in one winter night to supply him with paper, lest he should lose an idea. He took great pride in his famous grotto at Twickenham, a tunnel turned into an art-temple by the aid of a few shells. Here he loved to receive his friends Swift, Bolingbroke, Gay, and the other wits of the time. He has secured the good-will of Americans by having gone to sleep at his own table, when the Prince of Wales was talking poetry to him.

Pope's character excites a singular mixture of feelings, and is as full of contrasts as his satires. An invalid, but the most laborious of men. Always the subject of some stronger nature, Addison, Swift, Bolingbroke, even Warburton, but a subject far more powerful than his king. "A portentous cub," as Bentley calls him, at whose school the cleverest men for a century came to receive a final polish. A tender heart, whose chief delight was in the torture of his fellows. A feeble dwarf, fighting against a world in arms. A dependent feminine nature, whose enmity was more feared than the thunderbolts of Jove!

The key to these contradictions is not far to seek, ——

a genius fretted nearly to madness by its prison-hous、 of pain and deformity. Pope's life was one long effort to make "defect perfection" by the magic of genius.

In one relation of life his conduct was thoroughly lovable, he was the best of sons. His mother lived under his watchful care until eleven years before his death, and all his many allusions to his parents breathe the strength and simplicity of true poetry.

Pope's reputation has withstood many attacks since Cowper said that he

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler had his tune by heart."

Judged by a crucial test, the amount of verbal legal tender stamped with his name,-Pope as a writer ranks second only to Shakespeare. No author is more often unconsciously quoted. Yet few of his admirers now claim for him a place among the higher order of singers.

Pope is, however, easily the chief of wits, in the wide sense of the word in his day. Wit, of which the wit was the personification, implied correctness, brilliancy, taste, skill, climax, all the charms of writing, except the "grace beyond the reach of art," which it would doubtless have included if it could. The product of what we call polite society, the wit, as an ideal, has always had an ardent following in France, as it also had in England during the century after Milton, when England was under the influence of French taste.

As wit, satirist, and artist in words, Pope stands first, without second, among all writers.

1.-POPE'S APOLOGY FOR HIMSELF.

[The purpose of this "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" is thus stated by the poet himself: "It is a sort of bill of complaint, begun many years since, and drawn up by snatches, as the several occasions offered. I had no thoughts of publishing it, till it pleased some persons to attack, in a very extraordinary manner, not only my writings (of which, being public, the public is judge), but my person, morals, and family, whereof, to those who know me not, a truer information may be requisite. If the epistle have any thing pleasing, it will be that by which I am most desirous to please, the truth and the sentiment; and if any thing offensive, it will be only to those I am least sorry to offend, the vicious or the ungenerous."]

SHUT, shut the door, good John! fatigued I said;
Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead.
The dog-star rages!2 nay, 'tis past a doubt,
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide;1

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4 They pierce they glide. The grounds of Pope's villa at Twickenham, altogether about five acres, were cut in two by the turnpike road leading from London to Hampton Court. To obviate the awkwardness of crossing this road, he had an underground passage

2 The dog-star rages. The poet figures the influence of the dog-star (Sirius) as inflaming the brains of the writers whom he is about to satirize. 3 All Bedlam, or Parnassus. constructed at an expense of £1,000. "Bedlam," a madhouse; 'Parnassus," a mountain in Greece sacred to Apollo and the Muses, but here meaning the whole crew of poet

asters.

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It terminated in a kind of open temple, "wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner." This was my grot. My thicket is a shrubbery called "The Grove."

By land, by water, they renew the charge,
They stop the chariot, and they board the barge.
No place is sacred, not the church is free;
Even Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me:
Then from the Mint1 walks forth the man of rhyme,
Happy to catch me just at dinner-time.

Friend to my life! 2 (which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song,)
What drop or nostrum 3 can this plague remove?
Or which must end me, a fool's wrath or love?
A dire dilemma! either way I'm sped;

If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead.
Seized and tied down to judge,5 how wretched I!
Who can't be silent, and who will not lie.
To laugh were want of goodness and of grace,
And to be grave exceeds all power of face.
I sit with sad civility, I read

With honest anguish, and an aching head;
And drop at last, but in unwilling ears,

This saving counsel: "Keep your piece nine years.'
Nine years! cries he, who high in Drury-lane,7
Lulled by soft zephyrs through the broken pane,
Rhymes ere he wakes, and prints before term ends,9
Obliged by hunger, and request of friends:

1 Mint, a district in London which was a refuge for debtors. 2 Friend to my life. Dr. Arbuth

not. (See Introduction.)

3 nostrum. See Glossary. 4 this plague. Explain.

5 to judge, to give opinion on the manuscripts of the poetasters.

This

6 Keep... nine years. saving counsel is given by Horace in his Ars Poetica.

7 Drury-lane. A London haunt of poor authors.

8 rhymes, makes verses.

9 before term ends, before the end of the London season.

"The piece, you think, is incorrect? why, take it;
I'm all submission: what you'd have it, make it."
Three things another's modest wishes bound,—
My friendship, and a prologue, and ten pound.
Pitholeon 1 sends to me: "You know his Grace
"I want a patron: ask him for a place."
Pitholeon libeled me; "but here's a letter
Informs you, sir, 'twas when he knew no better.
Dare you refuse him? Curll2 invites to dine,
He'll write a journal, or he'll turn divine."
Bless me! a packet. ""Tis a stranger sues,
A virgin tragedy, an orphan muse."
If I dislike it, "Furies, death, and rage!"
If I approve," Commend it to the stage."
There, thank my stars, my whole commission ends:
The players and I, are, luckily, no friends.

Fired that the house reject him, "'Sdeath I'll print it,
And shame the fools—your interest, sir, with Lintot."3
Lintot, dull rogue! will think your price too much:
"Not, sir, if you revise it, and retouch."

All my demurs but double his attacks;
At last he whispers, "Do; and we go snacks."5
Glad of a quarrel, strait I shut the door:
Sir, let me see your works and you no more.
One dedicates in high heroic prose,
And ridicules beyond a hundred foes.

1 Pitholeon, the name of one of Horace's imaginary literary bores. 2 Curll, a London bookseller. 3 Lintot. Bernard Lintot, Pope's own publisher.

4 demurs. See Webster.

5

go snacks. Explain.

6 ridicules . . . foes: that is, makes Pope more ridiculous than a hundred enemies could do.

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