he had wept in his last struggles, and he employed Mallet, another friend of Pope, to tell the tale to the publick with all its aggravations. Warburton, whose heart was warm with his legacy and tender by the recent separation, thought it proper for him to interpose, and undertook, not indeed to vindicate the action, for breach of trust has always something criminal, but to extenuate it by an apology3. Having advanced, what cannot be denied, that moral obliquity is made more or less excusable by the motives that produce it, he enquires what evil purpose could have induced Pope to break his promise. He could not delight his vanity by usurping the work, which, though not sold in shops, had been shewn to a number more than sufficient to preserve the author's claim; he could not gratify his avarice, for he could not sell his plunder till Bolingbroke was dead; and even then, if the copy was left to another, his fraud would be defeated, and if left to himself would be useless 4. 253 Warburton therefore supposes, with great appearance of reason, that the irregularity of his conduct proceeded wholly from his zeal for Bolingbroke, who might perhaps have destroyed the -"Who talks against Pope? He was the best of friends and the best of men"; and so relapsed into his state of insensibility.' 60. 3 Warburton's Works, 1811, xii. * In Gent. Mag. 1749, pp. 196, 240, three pamphlets are mentioned in defence of Pope. In one of them Mallet is described as 'a fellow who, while Mr. P. lived, was as diligent in licking his feet as he is now in licking Lord B's.' Bolingbroke, speaking of himself, says:- He asserted long ago, and he asserts still, that he never broke the terms of friendship with any man who had not broken them previously with him.. The long friendship L. B. had for Mr. P. is an aggravation of a real fault committed by the latter in breaking a trust.' He writes of Pope's death-bed :'He was conscious of having betrayed his friend, and hardened enough not to own it in that moment wherein every other heart is ready to open itself. A Familiar Epistle, 1749, pp. 11, 16, 22. pamphlet, which Pope thought it his duty to preserve, even without its author's approbation. To this apology an answer was written in a Letter to the most impudent man living2. He brought some reproach upon his own memory by the 254 petulant and contemptuous mention made in his will of Mr. Allen3, and an affected repayment of his benefactions. Mrs. Blount, as the known friend and favourite of Pope, had been invited to the house of Allen, where she comported herself with such indecent arrogance that she parted from Mrs. Allen in a state of irreconcileable dislike, and the door was for ever barred against her 4. This exclusion she resented with so much bitterness as to refuse any legacy from Pope, unless he left the world with a disavowal of obligation to Allen. Having been long under her dominion, now tottering in the decline of life and unable to resist the violence of her temper, or, perhaps with the prejudice of a lover, persuaded that she had suffered improper treatment, he complied with her demand and polluted his will with female resentment 5. Post, POPE, 263, 287. See Ruffhead's Pope, pp. 522-32, and 569end, where Warburton's vindication is given. 'Bolingbroke quitted the Pretender because he found him incapable of making a good Prince. He himself, if in power, would have made the best of ministers. These things will be proved one of these days. The proofs are ready, and the world will see them.' POPE, Spence's Anec. p. 300. Pope referred, no doubt, to The Patriot King. * A Familiar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man Living. 1749. Price sixpence. 'It exists entire in Bolingbroke's hand.' Watson's Warburton, p. 363. See also Boswell's Johnson, i. 329. [This sentence is not in the Ist ed. of the Lives.] Smollett speaks of Bolingbroke in 1748:Seemingly sequestered from the tumults of a public life he resided at Battersea, where he was visited like a sainted shrine by all the distinguished votaries of wit, eloquence, and political ambition.' Hist. of Eng. iii. 237. He died on Dec. 15, 1751. 3 Ante, POPE, 168, 194. • Writing to Pope from Allen's house in 1743 she complained that ... she experienced 'from every one of them much greater inhumanity than I could conceive anybody could show. Mr. Warburton took no notice of me. They have not one of them named your name, nor drunk your health since you went.' Pope replied:'However well I might wish the man, the woman is a minx, and an impertinent one, and he will do what she would have him. W. is a sneaking parson, and I told him he flattered.' Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), ix. 332-5. Allen in March, 1744, called on Pope. 'He assured me, Pope wrote to Mrs. Blount, 'it all rested upon a mutual misunderstanding between you two, which appeared in two or three days, and which he spoke to his wife about, but found he could not make her at all easy in.' Ib. p. 337. See also Spence's Anec. p. 358. , Hawkins says that Mrs. Blount took 5 In the proof-sheet, 'with post- Allen accepted the legacy, which he gave to the Hospital at Bath, observing that Pope was always a bad accomptant, and that if to 150l. he had put a cypher more he had come nearer to the truth 2. 255 THE person of Pope is well known not to have been formed by the nicest model3. He has, in his account of the 'Little ✓ Club,' compared himself to a spider, and by another is described as protuberant behind and before 5. He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy; but he was of a constitution originally feeble and weak, and as bodies of a tender frame are easily distorted his deformity was probably in part the effect of his application. His stature was so low that, to bring him to a level with common tables, it was necessary to raise his seat". rity is Ruffhead (pp. 547, 576), whose authority, no doubt, was Warburton. She said to Spence:-'I had never read his will; but he mentioned to me the part relating to Mr. Allen, and I advised him to omit it.' Spence's Anec. p. 357. For pollute see ante, DRYDEN, 173. 'Item, In case Ralph Allen, Esq., shall survive me, I order my Executors to pay him the sum of £150, being, to the best of my calculation, the account of what I have received from him; partly for my own, and partly for charitable uses. If he refuses to take this himself, I desire him to employ it in a way I am persuaded he will not dislike, to the benefit of the Bath Hospital.' Warton, ix. 417. 'This unkind clause,' said Warburton, 'was inserted at the instigation, and to quiet the impotent passions of another.' Ruffhead's Pope, p. 576. * According to Ruffhead (p. 547), 'Mr. Allen doubled the legacy Mr. Pope left to his favourite servant, John Searl, and took him and his family into his protection.' The legacy was £100, over and above a year's wages to himself and his wife.' Warton, ix. 418. Searl was the 'good John' of the first line of Pro. Sat. 3 For a list of his portraits see Cunningham's Lives of the Poets, iii. 95. * 'The figure of the man is odd enough; he is a lively little creature with long arms and legs; a spider is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.' The Guardian, No. 92. See ante, POPE, 216 n. 2. 5 Whoever hath anything fixed in his person that doth induce contempt hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn.' BACON, Essays, No. 44. 'Chantez, pauvre petit.' BÉRAN GER. 6 Pope told Spence that 'his perpetual application (after he set to study of himself) reduced him in four years to so bad a state of health that he sat down calmly in a full expectation of death in a short time. He was saved by following Dr. Radcliffe's advice 'to apply less and to ride every day.' Spence's Anec. р. 7. For his portrait as a healthy child of ten see ib. p. 26. For his studying see ante, POPE, 16, 19. ' In describing the Short Club he says that, before the Club-room was fitted up, 'the table was so high that one who came by chance to the door, seeing our chins just above the pewter dishes, took us for a circle of men that sate ready to be shaved, and sent in half-a-dozen barbers.' The Guardian, No. 91. But his face was not displeasing, and his eyes were animated and vivid 1. By natural deformity or accidental distortion his vital func-256 tions were so much disordered that his life was a 'long disease 2.' His most frequent assailant was the headach, which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee, which he very frequently required 3. Most of what can be told concerning his petty peculiarities 257 was communicated by a female domestick of the Earl of Oxford, who knew him perhaps after the middle of life. He was then so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female attendance; extremely sensible of cold, so that he wore a kind of fur doublet under a shirt of very coarse warm linen with fine sleeves. When he rose he was invested in boddice made of stiff canvass, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat 6. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean 7. I He is thus described by Thomson in The Castle of Indolence, ii. 33:'He came, the bard, a little Druid wight, As is his sister of the copses green, 'His sister' was the nightingale. See ante, POPE, 3. 'His eye,' writes Warburton, 'was fine, sharp and piercing.' Warburton, iv. 17. Reynolds, who saw him about 1740, described him as 'about four feet six high; very humpbacked and deformed; he wore a black coat, and had on a little sword. He had a large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which always are found in the mouths of crooked persons, and the muscles which run across the cheek were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords. Roubiliac, who made a bust of him 2 Pope wrote to Aaron Hill on 3 Gent. Mag. 1775, p. 435. 5 [' A variant of bodies, the original 258 His hair had fallen almost all away, and he used to dine sometimes with Lord Oxford, privately, in a velvet cap. His dress of ceremony was black', with a tye-wig and a little sword. 259 The indulgence and accommodation which his sickness required had taught him all the unpleasing and unsocial qualities of a valetudinary man2. He expected that every thing should give way to his ease or humour, as a child whose parents will not hear her cry has an unresisted dominion in the nursery. 'C'est que l'enfant toujours est homme, When he wanted to sleep he 'nodded in company'; and once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry. 260 The reputation which his friendship gave procured him many invitations; but he was a very troublesome inmate 5. He brought no servant, and had so many wants that a numerous attendance Lord [Hervey), says:-'It is true, my Lord, I am short, not well-shaped, generally ill-dressed, if not sometimes dirty. Warton, iii. 334. 'Poor Pope was so weak and infirm, and his body required so many wrappers and coverings, that it was hardly possible for him to be neat. No poet, except Malherbe, ever wore so many pair of stockings.' WARTON, Essay, ii. 399. Broome thus describes him :- Through av'rice ill-clad, maliciously Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), I In the account of the Short Club he says the poet has been elected President, 'not only as he is the shortest of us all, but because he has entertained so just a sense of his stature, as to go generally in black, that he may appear yet less.' The Guardian, No. 92. * 'JOHNSON. I do not know a more disagreeable character than a valetudinarian, who thinks he may do anything that is for his ease, and indulges himself in the grossest freedom. Sir, he brings himself to the state of a hog in a stye.' Boswell's Johnson, iii. 152. See also ib. p. 1, and Spence's Anec. р. 332. 3 Johnson quotes these lines in a letter to Mrs. Thrale written while he was writing the Life of Pope. John. Lett. ii. 183. 'I nod in company, I wake at night, Fools rush into my head, and so I write.' Imit. Hor., Sat. ii. 1. 13. Lord Marchmont said 'that if the conversation did not take something of a lively or epigrammatic turn he fell asleep, or perhaps pretended to do so.' John. Misc. ii. 4. The old Duchess of Marlborough mentions in 1742 'the disappointment when he falls asleep.' Marchmont Papers, ii. 269. See also Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), vii. 12, ix. 508. Warburton (Pope's Works, 1757, ix. 6 n.) speaks of his constant custom of sleeping after dinner.' 5 He thanks the second Earl of Oxford for 'the great indulgence you gave me in my variety of negotiations at your house, in my irregular entrances and exits, in my unseasonable suppers and separate breakfasts, and in all my ways.' Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), viii. 316. |